Yet I looked mechanically at the lady, and seeing that her eyes glistened in the firelight, and that she gazed at me very kindly, I wondered still more; falling, indeed, into a very confusion of amazement.

This was not lessened but augmented a hundredfold when, turning in obedience to the pressure of de Rosny's hand, I saw beside me, as if she had risen from the floor, another lady--no other than Mademoiselle de la Vire herself! She had that moment stepped out of the shadow of the great fireplace, which had hitherto hidden her, and stood before me curtseying prettily, with the same look on her face and in her eyes which madame's wore.
'Mademoiselle!' I muttered, unable to take my eyes from her.
'Mais oui, monsieur, mademoiselle,' she answered, curtseying lower, with the air of a child rather than a woman.
'Here ?' I stammered, my mouth open, my eyes staring.
'Here, sir--thanks to the valour of a brave man,' she answered, speaking in a voice so low I scarcely heard her.

And then, dropping her eyes, she stepped back into the shadow, as if either she had said too much already, or doubted her composure were she to say more.

She was so radiantly dressed, she looked in the firelight more like a fairy than a woman, being of small and delicate proportions; and she seemed in my eyes so different a person, particularly in respect of the softened expression of her features, from the Mademoiselle de la Vire whom I had known and seen plunged in sloughs and bent to the saddle with fatigue, that I doubted still if I had seen aright, and was as far from enlightenment as before.
It was M.de Rosny himself who relieved me from the embarrassment I was suffering.

He embraced me in the most kind and obliging manner, and this more than once; begging me to pardon the deception he had practised upon me, and to which he had been impelled partly by the odd nature of our introduction at the inn, and partly by his desire to enhance the joyful surprise he had in store for me.