On her arrival, she was compelled to describe her visit to the smallest detail; discuss the inmates of the chateau, the guests, the entertainments, the dinners, and the final catastrophe.
What torture for her, when, absorbed as she was by a single, unchanging thought, she had so much need of silence and solitude! But there was something even more terrible than that.
On the first day after her return Frantz resumed his former place; and the glances with which he followed her, the words he addressed to her alone, seemed to her exasperating beyond endurance.
Despite all his shyness and distrust of himself, the poor fellow believed that he had some rights as an accepted and impatient lover, and little Chebe was obliged to emerge from her dreams to reply to that creditor, and to postpone once more the maturity of his claim.
A day came, however, when indecision ceased to be possible.

She had promised to marry Frantz when he had obtained a good situation; and now an engineer's berth in the South, at the smelting-furnaces of Grand Combe, was offered to him.

That was sufficient for the support of a modest establishment.
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.