turned from time to time to look at Henri, and appeared to follow the
old woman regretfully, seeming to be at once her mistress and her
slave; she could break her with blows, but could not dismiss her. All
that was perceptible. The two friends reached the gate. Two men in
livery let down the step of a tasteful _coupe_ emblazoned with
armorial bearings. The girl with the golden eyes was the first to
enter it, took her seat at the side where she could be best seen when
the carriage turned, put her hand on the door, and waved her
handkerchief in the duennna's despite. In contempt of what might be
said by the curious, her handkerchief cried to Henri openly: "Follow
me!"

"Have you ever seen a handkerchief better thrown?" said Henri to Paul
de Manerville.

Then, observing a fiacre on the point of departure, having just set
down a fare, he made a sign to the driver to wait.

"Follow that carriage, notice the house and the street where it stops
--you shall have ten francs. . . . Paul, adieu."

The cab followed the _coupe_. The _coupe_ stopped in the Rue Saint
Lazare before one of the finest houses of the neighborhood.

De Marsay was not impulsive. Any other young man would have obeyed his
impulse to obtain at once some information about a girl who realized
so fully the most luminous ideas ever expressed upon women in the
poetry of the East; but, too experienced to compromise his good
fortune, he had told his coachman to continue along the Rue Saint
Lazare and carry him back to his house. The next day, his confidential