"Yes," she replied, with a smile, gracious, yet with a touch of sadness,
"I know you do. But her you love!"
Might it not have been sweet to her had he answered "No, I loved her once, and remembered that old love enough to risk my life for her, but in reality I now love only you—all the more at this moment when I see you love me more than yourself." But, instead, he murmured only, like a man. and a lover: "And Jacqueline—do you think she loves me?" His anxiety, a thrill that ran through all his frame, the light in his eyes, his sudden pallor, told more than his words.
If Giselle could have doubted his love for Jacqueline before, she would have now been convinced of it. The conviction stabbed her to the heart. Death is not that last sleep in which all our faculties, weakened and exhausted, fail us; it is the blow which annihilates our supreme illusion and leaves us disabused in a cold and empty world. People walk, talk, and smile after this death—another ghost is added to the drama played on the stage of the world; but the real self is dead.
Giselle was too much of a woman, angelic as she was, to have any courage left to say: "Yes, I know she loves you."
She said instead, in a low voice: "That is a question you must ask of her."
Meantime, in the next room they could hear Madame d'Argy vehemently repeating: "Never! No, I never will consent! Is it a plot between you?"
They heard also a rumbling monotone preceding each of these vehement interruptions. The Abbe Bardin was pointing out to her that, unmarried, her son would return to Tonquin, that Lizerolles would be left deserted, her house would be desolate without daughter-in-law or grandchildren; and, as he drew these pictures, he came back, again and again, to his main argument:
"I will answer for their happiness: I will answer for the future."
His authority as a priest gave weight to this assurance, at least Madame d'Argy felt it so. She went on saying never, but less and less emphatically, and apparently she ceased to say it at last, for three months later the d'Etaples, the Rays, the d'Avrignys and the rest, received two wedding announcements in these words:
"Madame d'Argy has the honor to inform you of the marriage of her son,
M. Frederic d'Argy, Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, to Mademoiselle de
Nailles."