The captain was the first to break the silence. “I’ faith,” he said, with his air of fatuous assurance, “a bewitching creature! What say you, fair cousin?”

This remark, which a more tactful admirer would at least have made in an undertone, was not calculated to allay the feminine jealousy so sharply on the alert in the presence of the gipsy girl.

Fleur-de-Lys answered her fiancé in an affected tone of contemptuous indifference, “Ah, not amiss.”

The others put their heads together and whispered.

At last Madame Aloïse, not the least jealous of the party because she was so for her daughter, accosted the dancer: “Come hither, little one.”

“Come hither, little one,” repeated, with comical dignity, Berangère, who would have reached about to her elbow.

The Egyptian advanced towards the noble lady.

“Pretty one,” said Phœbus, impressively advancing on his side a step or two towards her, “I know not if I enjoy the supreme felicity of being remembered by you; but—”

She interrupted him, with a smile and a glance of infinite sweetness—“Oh, yes,” she said.

“She has a good memory,” observed Fleur-de-Lys.

“Well,” resumed Phœbus, “but you fled in a great hurry that evening. Were you frightened of me?”

“Oh, no,” answered the gipsy. And in the tone of this “Oh, no,” following on the “Oh, yes,” there was an indefinable something which stabbed poor Fleur-de-Lys to the heart.

“You left in your stead, ma belle,” continued the soldier, whose tongue was loosened now that he spoke to a girl of the streets, “a wry-faced, one-eyed hunchback varlet—the Bishop’s bell-ringer, by what I can hear. They tell me he is an archdeacon’s bastard and a devil by birth. He has a droll name too—Ember Week—Palm Sunday—Shrove Tuesday—something of that kind—some bell-ringing festival name, at any rate. And so he had the assurance to carry you off, as if you were made for church beadles! It was like his impudence. And what the devil did he want with you, this screech-owl, eh?”

“I do not know,” she answered.

“Conceive of such insolence! A bell-ringer to carry off a girl, like a vicomte—a clown poaching on a gentleman’s preserves! Unheard-of presumption! For the rest, he paid dearly for it. Master Pierrat Torterue is the roughest groom that ever curried a rascal; and I can tell you, for your satisfaction, that your bell- ringer’s hide got a thorough dressing at his hands.”

“Poor man!” murmured the gipsy, recalling at these words the scene of the pillory.

The captain burst out laughing. “Corne de bœuf! your pity is as well-placed as a feather in a sow’s tail! May I have a paunch like a pope, if—” He drew up short. “Crave your pardon, mesdames! I believe I was on the point of forgetting myself.”

“Fie, sir!” said La Gaillefontaine.

“He speaks to this creature in her own language,” said Fleur-de-Lys under her breath, her vexation increasing with every moment. Nor was this vexation diminished by seeing the captain delighted with the gipsy girl, but still more with himself, turn on his heel and repeat with blatant and soldier-like gallantry: “A lovely creature, on my soul!”