They walked rapidly through the crowd that at five o’clock follows the summer evenings. Men turned around to look at Annette and whispered indistinct words of admiration as they passed. It was the first time since her mourning, since black was adding that brilliancy to her daughter’s beauty, that the countess had gone out with her in Paris, and the sensation of that street success, that roused attention, those whispered compliments, that little eddy of flattering emotion which the passing of a pretty woman leaves in a crowd of men, oppressed her heart little by little with the same painful shrinking she had experienced the other evening in her drawing room, when the young girl was being compared to her own portrait. In spite of herself she was watching for those glances of which Annette was the attraction; she felt them coming from afar, glance off her face without stopping, suddenly arrested by the fair face at her side. She guessed, she saw in the eyes the rapid and silent homage to this blooming youth, to the attractive charm of that freshness, and she thought, “I looked as well as she, if not better.” Suddenly the thought of Olivier shot through her brain, and she was seized, as she had been at Roncières, with an irresistible desire to run away.