The Count of Monte Cristo

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pursuing, to see upon what person this dark look was directed. Then he
saw beneath a thick clump of linden-trees, which were nearly divested
of foliage, Madame de Villefort sitting with a book in her hand, the
perusal of which she frequently interrupted to smile upon her son, or
to throw back his elastic ball, which he obstinately threw from the
drawing-room into the garden. Villefort became pale; he understood the
old man's meaning. Noirtier continued to look at the same object, but
suddenly his glance was transferred from the wife to the husband, and
Villefort himself had to submit to the searching investigation of eyes,
which, while changing their direction and even their language, had lost
none of their menacing expression. Madame de Villefort, unconscious of
the passions that exhausted their fire over her head, at that moment
held her son's ball, and was making signs to him to reclaim it with a
kiss. Edward begged for a long while, the maternal kiss probably not
offering sufficient recompense for the trouble he must take to obtain
it; however at length he decided, leaped out of the window into a
cluster of heliotropes and daisies, and ran to his mother, his forehead