The duke could not have consented to accept her society in place of her daughter's; but I risked the impropriety and hazarded the suggestion to Mme.Delhasse.Her face curled in cunning wrinkles.

She seemed to be about to speak, but then she shut her lips with a snap, and suspicion betrayed itself again in her eyes.

She had a secret--a fresh secret--I could have sworn, and in her triumph she had come near to saying something that might have cast light on it.
"By the way," I said, "your daughter did not expect my coming." It was perhaps a vain hope, but I thought that I might save Marie from a tirade.
The old woman shrugged her shoulders, and observed carelessly: "The fool may do what she likes;" and with this she knocked at the door.
I did not wait to see it opened--to confess the truth, I felt not sure of my temper were I forced to see her and Marie together--but went downstairs and into my own room.

There I sat down in a chair by the window close to a small table, for I meant to write a letter or two to friends at home, in case the duke's left hand should prove more skillful than mine when we met that evening.

But, finding that I could hardly write with my right hand and couldn't write at all with the other, I contented myself with scrawling laboriously a short note to Gustave de Berensac, which I put in my pocket, having indorsed on it a direction for its delivery in case I should meet with an accident.