Amuse him! How could he be amused by so great an insult? What! thank
her for giving him over even in thought to Giselle or to anybody? Oh,
how wicked, how ungrateful, how unworthy!

The six pages of foreign-post paper were crumpled up by his angry
fingers. Fred tore them with his teeth, and finally made them into a
ball which he flung into the sea, hating himself for having been so
foolish as to let himself be caught by the first lines, as a foolish fish
snaps at the bait, when, apropos to the church in which she would like to
be married, she had added "But we should have to be content with Saint-
Augustin."

Those words had delighted him as if they had really been meant for
himself and Jacqueline. This promise for the future, that seemed to
escape involuntarily from her pen, had made him find all the rest of her
letter piquant and amusing. As he read, his mind had reverted to that
little phrase which he now found he had interpreted wrongly. What a
fall! How his hopes now crumbled under his feet! She must have done it
on purpose--but no, he need not blacken her! She had written without
thought, without purpose, in high spirits; she wanted to be witty, to be
droll, to write gossip without any reference to him to whom her letter
was addressed. That we who some day would make a triumphal entry into
St. Augustin would be herself and some other man--some man with whom her
acquaintance had been short, since she did not seem to feel in that
matter like Giselle. Some one she did not yet know? Was that sure? She
might know her future husband already, even now she might have made her
choice--Marcel d'Etaples, perhaps, who looked so well in uniform, or that
M. de Cymier, who led the cotillon so divinely. Yes! No doubt it was
he--the last-comer. And once more Fred suffered all the pangs of