"What a pity!" she said to herself, glancing alternately at Zibeline and
at her brother, between whom a tone of frank comradeship had been
established, free from any coquetry on her side or from gallantry on his.

The more clearly Henri divined the thoughts of his sister, the more he
affected to remain insensible to the natural seductions of his neighbor,
to whom Lenaieff, on the contrary, addressed continually, in his soft and
caressing voice, compliments upon compliments and madrigals upon
madrigals!

"Take care, my dear Constantin!" said Henri to him, bluntly. "You will
make Mademoiselle de Vermont quite impossible. If you go on thus, she
will take herself seriously as a divinity!"

"Fortunately," rejoined Zibeline, "you are there, General, to remind me
that I am only a mortal, as Philippe's freedman reminded his master every
morning."

"You can not complain! I serve you as a confederate, to allow you to
display your erudition," retorted the General, continuing his persiflage.

But he, too, was only a man, wavering and changeable, to use Montaigne's
expression, for his eyes, contradicting the brusqueness of his speech,
rested long, and not without envy, on this beautiful and tempting fruit
which his fate forbade him to gather. The more he admired her freshness,
and the more he inhaled her sweetness, the more the image of Eugenie
Gontier was gradually effaced from his memory, like one of those tableaux
on the stage, which gauze curtains, descending from the flies, seem to
absorb without removing, gradually obliterating the pictures as they
fall, one after another.