Often, when they talked together of Paris, she ended by murmuring, “Ah! how happy we should be there!”

“Are we not happy?” gently answered the young man passing his hands over her hair.

“Yes, that is true,” she said. “I am mad. Kiss me!”

To her husband she was more charming than ever. She made him pistachio-creams, and played him waltzes after dinner. So he thought himself the most fortunate of men and Emma was without uneasiness, when, one evening suddenly he said⁠—

“It is Mademoiselle Lempereur, isn’t it, who gives you lessons?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I saw her just now,” Charles went on, “at Madame Liégeard’s. I spoke to her about you, and she doesn’t know you.”