“You see that child, cousin—­well, no one has ever been able to find out what her thoughts were.”

Thereupon the whole party rose and repaired to the grand salon.

While the guests invited for the ball were arriving and mingling with the dinner-guests, while the orchestra was tuning up, while the cavaliers, eyeglass in position, strutted before the impatient, white-gowned damsels, the bridegroom, awed by so great a throng, had taken refuge with his friend Planus—­Sigismond Planus, cashier of the house of Fromont for thirty years—­in that little gallery decorated with flowers and hung with a paper representing shrubbery and clambering vines, which forms a sort of background of artificial verdure to Vefour’s gilded salons.

“Sigismond, old friend—­I am very happy.”

And Sigismond too was happy; but Risler did not give him time to say so.  Now that he was no longer in dread of weeping before his guests, all the joy in his heart overflowed.

“Just think of it, my friend!—­It’s so extraordinary that a young girl like Sidonie would consent to marry me.  For you know I’m not handsome.  I didn’t need to have that impudent creature tell me so this morning to know it.  And then I’m forty-two—­and she such a dear little thing!  There were so many others she might have chosen, among the youngest and the richest, to say nothing of my poor Frantz, who loved her so.  But, no, she preferred her old Risler.  And it came about so strangely.  For a long time I noticed that she was sad, greatly changed.  I felt sure there was some disappointment in love at the bottom of it.  Her mother and I looked about, and we cudgelled our brains to find out what it could be.  One morning Madame Chebe came into my room weeping, and said, ’You are the man she loves, my dear friend!’—­And I was the man—­I was the man!  Bless my soul!  Whoever would have suspected such a thing?  And to think that in the same year I had those two great pieces of good fortune—­a partnership in the house of Fromont and married to Sidonie—­Oh!”

At that moment, to the strains of a giddy, languishing waltz, a couple whirled into the small salon.  They were Risler’s bride and his partner, Georges Fromont.  Equally young and attractive, they were talking in undertones, confining their words within the narrow circle of the waltz.

“You lie!” said Sidonie, slightly pale, but with the same little smile.

And the other, paler than she, replied: 

“I do not lie.  It was my uncle who insisted upon this marriage.  He was dying—­you had gone away.  I dared not say no.”

Risler, at a distance, gazed at them in admiration.

“How pretty she is!  How well they dance!”

But, when they spied him, the dancers separated, and Sidonie walked quickly to him.

“What!  You here?  What are you doing?  They are looking everywhere for you.  Why aren’t you in there?”

As she spoke she retied his cravat with a pretty, impatient gesture.  That enchanted Risler, who smiled at Sigismond from the corner of his eye, too overjoyed at feeling the touch of that little gloved hand on his neck, to notice that she was trembling to the ends of her slender fingers.