This scene made a deep impression upon all present, varying according to their different personalities, but no one was more intensely moved than our young scholar. He had of course seen women before, but this was the first time that a woman had been revealed to him. Mademoiselle de Brumpt, as we have said, was marvellously beautiful, and this beauty had appeared to the boy under the most favorable circumstances. He experienced a strange emotion, a painful constriction of the heart, when, after the young girl's departure, Schneider, raising his glass, had announced that Mademoiselle de Brumpt was his betrothed and would soon be his wife.
What had passed in the salon? By what persuasive words had Schneider induced her to give such sudden consent? For the boy did not doubt from his host's tone of assurance that the girl had consented. Had she asked the private interview for the purpose of offering herself to him? In that case filial love must have been supreme to have induced the pure lily, the perfumed rose, to unite herself with this prickly holly, this coarse thistle; and it seemed to Charles that, were he her father, he would rather die a hundred deaths than buy back his life at the price of his daughter's happiness.
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