He had not ceased, he thought, bearing Gina a grudge; he judged her with more severity and bitterness than ever. And the fact that she accepted no one brought him a certain amount of pleasure. Not only did he rejoice in the disdain and malice with which she treated Béjard, but he was almost happy when she teased and repulsed Bergmans. Apparently she did not encourage either more than the other. "The little mischief-maker," he said to himself with a labored and artificial indigation, "in Door's place I'd teach her a lesson."
Distrustful as he was, he noticed one day the tender and almost passionate intonation m which she said a few inconsequential words to Door. And he was so troubled by it that, alone with her afterward, he gathered his courage and said, point blank:
"Why don't you marry Monsieur Bergmans?"
She burst out laughing, and looking him straight in the eye:
"I? Marry a demagogue like him and become the wife of Citizen Bergmans?" she cried with so great an accent of sincerity that Laurent allowed himself to believe her.
Although he protested bitterly, at heart he was overjoyed. Her words so greatly reassured him that he pretended to reproach Bergmans for his hesitancy and backwardness. He was deceitful unpremeditatedly, instinctively; he was indignant at his own diplomacy, and was furious at finding all the dictates of his upright conscience thwarted and paralyzed in the meshes of a sensual duplicity. If ostensibly he were serving his friend Bergmans, it was in spite of the cry of his flesh.
"I, marry? Ask for the hand of Mademoiselle Do-
