hat Sylvie had locked her up by way of punishment and out
of jealousy.

"She is getting to be quite pretty, that little thing," he said with
an easy air.

"She will be pretty," replied Mademoiselle Rogron.

"You ought to send her to Paris and put her in a shop," continued the
colonel. "She would make her fortune. The milliners all want pretty
girls."

"Is that really your advice?" asked Sylvie, in a troubled voice.

"Good!" thought the colonel, "I was right. Vinet advised me to marry
Pierrette just to spoil my chance with the old harridan. But," he said
aloud, "what else can you do with her? There's that beautiful girl
Bathilde de Chargeboeuf, noble and well-connected, reduced to
single-blessedness,--nobody will have her. Pierrette has nothing, and
she'll never marry. As for beauty, what is it? To me, for example,
youth and beauty are nothing; for haven't I been a captain of cavalry
in the imperial guard, and carried my spurs into all the capitals of
Europe, and known all the handsomest women of these capitals? Don't
talk to me; I tell you youth and beauty are devilishly common and
silly. At forty-eight," he went on, adding a few years to his age, to
match Sylvie's, "after surviving the retreat from Moscow and going
through that terrible campaign of France, a man is broken down; I'm
nothing but an old fellow now. A woman like you would pet me and care
for me, and her money, joined to my poor pension, would give me ease
in my old days; of course I should prefer such a woman to a little
minx who would worry the life out of me, and be thirty years old, with
passions, when I should be sixty, with rheumatism. At my age, a man
considers and calculates. To tell you the truth between ourselves, I
should not wish to have children."

Sylvie's face was an open book to the colonel during this tirade, and
her next question proved to him Vinet's perfidy.

"Then you don't love Pierrette?" she said.

"Heavens! are you out of your mind, my dear Sylvie?" he cried. "Can
those who have no teeth crack nuts? Thank God I've got some
common-sense and know what I'm about."

Sylvie thus reassured resolved not to show her own hand, and thought
herself very shrewd in putting her own ideas into her brother's mouth.

"Jerome," she said, "thought of the match."

"How could your brother take up such an incongruous idea? Why, it is
only a few days ago that, in order to find out his secrets, I told him
I loved Bathilde. He turned as white