There was no way of avoiding the question.  She must either keep her promise or invent an excuse for breaking it.  But what excuse could she invent?

In that pressing emergency, she thought of Desiree.  Although the lame little girl had never confided in her, she knew of her great love for Frantz.  Long ago she had detected it, with her coquette’s eyes, bright and changing mirrors, which reflected all the thoughts of others without betraying any of her own.  It may be that the thought that another woman loved her betrothed had made Frantz’s love more endurable to her at first; and, just as we place statues on tombstones to make them appear less sad, Desiree’s pretty, little, pale face at the threshold of that uninviting future had made it seem less forbidding to her.

Now it provided—­her with a simple and honorable pretext for freeing herself from her promise.

“No!  I tell you, mamma,” she said to Madame Chebe one day, “I never will consent to make a friend like her unhappy.  I should suffer too much from remorse,—­poor Desiree!  Haven’t you noticed how badly she looks since I came home; what a beseeching way she has of looking at me?  No, I won’t cause her that sorrow; I won’t take away her Frantz.”

Even while she admired her daughter’s generous spirit, Madame Chebe looked upon that as a rather exaggerated sacrifice, and remonstrated with her.

“Take care, my child; we aren’t rich.  A husband like Frantz doesn’t turn up every day.”

“Very well! then I won’t marry at all,” declared Sidonie flatly, and, deeming her pretext an excellent one, she clung persistently to it.  Nothing could shake her determination, neither the tears shed by Frantz, who was exasperated by her refusal to fulfil her promise, enveloped as it was in vague reasons which she would not even explain to him, nor the entreaties of Risler, in whose ear Madame Chebe had mysteriously mumbled her daughter’s reasons, and who in spite of everything could not but admire such a sacrifice.

“Don’t revile her, I tell you!  She’s an angel!” he said to his brother, striving to soothe him.

“Ah! yes, she is an angel,” assented Madame Chebe with a sigh, so that the poor betrayed lover had not even the right to complain.  Driven to despair, he determined to leave Paris, and as Grand Combe seemed too near in his frenzied longing for flight, he asked and obtained an appointment as overseer on the Suez Canal at Ismailia.  He went away without knowing, or caring to know aught of, Desiree’s love; and yet, when he went to bid her farewell, the dear little cripple looked up into his face with her shy, pretty eyes, in which were plainly written the words: 

“I love you, if she does not.”

But Frantz Risler did not know how to read what was written in those eyes.

Fortunately, hearts that are accustomed to suffer have an infinite store of patience.  When her friend had gone, the lame girl, with her charming morsel of illusion, inherited from her father and refined by her feminine nature, returned bravely to her work, saying to herself: