arrangement being completed, all present directed their course towards
the place of meeting.

That happened which almost always happens the dogs hunted on their own
account. Two or three sportsmen only followed the dogs; the rest got
lost. The abbe, in his character of esquire to the marquise, had not
left her for a moment, and had managed so cleverly that he was alone with
her--an opportunity which he had been seeking for a month previously with
no less care--than the marquise had been using to avoid it. No sooner,
therefore, did the marquise believe herself aware that the abbe had
intentionally turned aside from the hunt than she attempted to gallop her
horse in the opposite direction from that which she had been following;
but the abbe stopped her. The marquise neither could nor would enter
upon a struggle; she resigned herself, therefore, to hearing what the
abbe had to say to her, and her face assumed that air of haughty disdain
which women so well know how to put on when they wish a man to understand
that he has nothing to hope from them. There was an instant's silence;
the abbe was the first to break it.

"Madame," said he, "I ask your pardon for having used this means to speak
to you alone; but since, in spite of my rank of brother-in-law, you did
not seem inclined to grant me that favour if I had asked it, I thought it
would be better for me, to deprive you of the power to refuse it me."

"If you have hesitated to ask me so simple a thing, monsieur," replied
the marquise, "and if you have taken such precautions to compel me to
listen to you, it must, no doubt, be because you knew beforehand that the
words you had to say to me were such as I could not hear. Have the
goodness, therefore, to reflect, before you open this conversation, that
here as elsewhere I reserve the right--and I warn you of it--to interrupt