“I was not the rope, but I had lived near the rose; I reminded you of her continually.  We two loved her; each of us felt we did.  Even when you said harm of her, I knew it was merely because you longed to utter her name, and repeat to yourself her perfections.  I laughed, yes, I laughed to myself, and I was careful how I contradicted you.  I tried to keep you safe for her, to prevent your going elsewhere and forming attachments which might have resulted in your forgetting her.  I did my best—­do me justice—­I did my best; perhaps sometimes I pushed things a little far in her interest, in that of your mother, but in yours more than all; in yours, for God knows I am all for you,” said Giselle, with sudden and involuntary fervor.

“Yes, I am all yours as a friend, a faithful friend,” she resumed, almost frightened by the tones of her own voice; “but as to the slightest feeling of love between us, love the most spiritual, the most platonic—­yes, all men, I fancy, have a little of that kind of self-conceit.  Dear Fred, don’t imagine it—­Enguerrand would never have allowed it.”

She was smiling, half laughing, and he looked at her with astonishment, asking himself whether he could believe what she was saying, when he could recollect what seemed to him so many proofs to the contrary.  Yet in what she said there was no hesitation, no incoherence, no false note.  Pride, noble pride, upheld her to the end.  The first falsehood of her life was a masterpiece.

“Ah, Giselle!” he said at last, not knowing what to think, “I adore you!  I revere you!”

“Yes,” she replied, with a smile, gracious, yet with a touch of sadness, “I know you do.  But her you love!”

Might it not have been sweet to her had he answered “No, I loved her once, and remembered that old love enough to risk my life for her, but in reality I now love only you—­all the more at this moment when I see you love me more than yourself.”  But, instead, he murmured only, like a man. and a lover:  “And Jacqueline—­do you think she loves me?” His anxiety, a thrill that ran through all his frame, the light in his eyes, his sudden pallor, told more than his words.

If Giselle could have doubted his love for Jacqueline before, she would have now been convinced of it.  The conviction stabbed her to the heart.  Death is not that last sleep in which all our faculties, weakened and exhausted, fail us; it is the blow which annihilates our supreme illusion and leaves us disabused in a cold and empty world.  People walk, talk, and smile after this death—­another ghost is added to the drama played on the stage of the world; but the real self is dead.

Giselle was too much of a woman, angelic as she was, to have any courage left to say:  “Yes, I know she loves you.”

She said instead, in a low voice:  “That is a question you must ask of her.”

Meantime, in the next room they could hear Madame d’Argy vehemently repeating:  “Never!  No, I never will consent!  Is it a plot between you?”