The others looked at him interrogatively; he laughed.
"You will see, or rather you'll taste, and you will understand. I wish you all as good a magician as Mme. Des Boys."
"True," said M. Hervart, understanding him at last, "she has a real genius for cookery. Dinners of her planning are regular love-potions."
"You'll realise that when you get back to Paris."
"Yes, when I get back to Paris. I am taking a holiday here," said M. Hervart, pleased at this mark of confidence. He even added, so as to guard against possible suspicions:
"A holiday from love is not without a certain melancholy."
Rose had found it all very amusing, but when her father began speaking she stopped listening. Leonor, pleased at having made a witty remark, and afraid of not being able to think of another, had got up and was walking about the garden. Rose looked at him. The sight of this young animal interested her. And what curious words about love had issued from that mouth! So love was an exercise like tennis, or bicycling, or riding! What a revelation! And the most singular fancies took shape in her mind as she followed with her eyes the now distant figure of this ingenious and decisive young man.
"How do people play the game of love," she wondered, "real love? Xavier teaches me nothing. He knows all about it though, more probably than this young Leonor, but he takes care not to tell me. He treats me like a little girl, while he makes fun of my innocence. Oh! it's gentle fun, because he loves me; but all the same he rather abuses his superior position. A sport, a sport...."
Quitting the shrubbery, she went and sat down on an old stone bench in a lonely corner, from which she could keep a watch between the trees on all that was happening in the neighbourhood. She was fond of this nook and in it, before M. Hervart's arrival, she had spent whole mornings dreaming alone. She laughed at the childishness of those dreams now.
"It always seemed to me," she thought, "that the branches were just about to open, making way for some beautiful young cavalier.... Without saying a word, he would bring his horse to stop at my side, would lean down, pick me up, lay me across the saddle and off we would go. Then there was to be a mad, furious, endless gallop, and in the end I should go to sleep. And in reality I used to wake up as though from a sleep, even though I hadn't dropped off. Nothing happened but this dumb ride in the blue air, and yet, when I came to myself, I felt tired.... How often I have dreamed this dream! How often have I seen the lilac plumes bending to make way for my lovely young knight and his black horse! The horse was always black. I remember very little of the face of the Perseus who delivered me, for a few hours at least, from the bondage of my boring existence.... A sport? That was indeed a sport! What did he do with his Andromeda, this Perseus of mine? I've never been able to find out. What do Perseuses do with their Andromedas?"