‘George,’ she said, ’I am afraid things are not going pleasantly at Granpere.’

‘Not altogether,’ he answered.

‘But I suppose the marriage will go on?’ To this he made no answer, but shook his head, showing how impatient he was at being thus questioned.  ‘You ought to tell me,’ said Madame Faragon plaintively, ’considering how interested I must be in all that concerns you.’

‘I have nothing to tell.’

‘But is the marriage to be put off?’ again demanded Madame Faragon, with extreme anxiety.

’Not that I know of, Madame Faragon:  they will not ask me whether it is to be put off or not.’

‘But have they quarrelled with M. Urmand?’

‘No; nobody has quarrelled with M. Urmand.’

‘Was he there, George?’

’What, with me!  No; he was not there with me.  I have never seen the man since I first left Granpere to come here.’  And then George Voss began to think what might have happened had Adrian Urmand been at the hotel while he was there himself.  After all, what could he have said to Adrian Urmand? or what could he have done to him?

‘He hasn’t written, has he, to say that he is off his bargain?’ Poor Madame Faragon was almost pathetic in her anxiety to learn what had really occurred at the Lion d’Or.

‘Certainly not.  He has not written at all.’

‘Then what is it, George?’

‘I suppose it is this,—­that Marie Bromar cares nothing for him.’

’But so rich as he is!  And they say, too, such a good-looking young man.’

’It is wonderful, is it not?  It is next to a miracle that there should be a girl deaf and blind to such charms.  But, nevertheless, I believe it is so.  They will probably make her marry him, whether she likes it or not.’

‘But she is betrothed to him.  Of course she will marry him.’

‘Then there will be an end of it,’ said George.

There was one other question which Madame Faragon longed to ask; but she was almost too much afraid of her young friend to put it into words.  At last she plucked up courage, and did ask her question after an ambiguous way.

‘But I suppose it is nothing to you, George?’

‘Nothing at all.  Nothing on earth,’ said he.  ’How should it be anything to me?’ Then he hesitated for a while, pausing to think whether or not he would tell the truth to Madame Faragon.  He knew that there was no one on earth, setting aside his father and Marie Bromar, to whom he was really so dear as he was to this old woman.  She would probably do more for him, if it might possibly be in her power to do anything, than any other of his friends.  And, moreover, he did not like the idea of being false to her, even on such a subject as this.  ‘It is only this to me,’ he said, ’that she had promised to be my wife, before they had ever mentioned Urmand’s name to her.’

‘O, George!’

‘And why should she not have promised?’