e remarks
of Thuillier and his sister with the servility of a parasite; when he
played whist he justified the blunders of his dear, good friend, and he
kept upon his countenance a smile, fixed and benign, like that of Madame
Thuillier, ready to bestow upon all the bourgeois sillinesses of the
brother and sister.

He obtained, what he wanted above all, the contempt of his true
antagonists; and he used it as a cloak to hide his real power. For four
consecutive months his face wore a torpid expression, like that of a
snake as it gulps and digests its prey. But at times he would rush into
the garden with Colleville or Flavie, to laugh and lay off his mask,
and rest himself; or get fresh strength by giving way before his future
mother-in-law to fits of nervous passion which either terrified or
deeply touched her.

"Don't you pity me?" he cried to her the evening before the preparatory
sale of the house, when Thuillier was to make the purchase at
seventy-five thousand francs. "Think of a man like me, forced to creep
like a cat, to choke down every pointed word, to swallow my own gall,
and submit to your rebuffs!"

"My friend! my child!" Flavie replied, undecided in mind how to take
him.

These words are a thermometer which will show the temperature at which
this clever manipulator maintained his intrigue with Flavie. He kept
her floating between her heart and her moral sense, between religious
sentiments and this mysterious passion.

During this time Felix Phellion was giving, with a devotion and
constancy worthy of all praise, regular lessons to young Colleville.
He spent much of his time upon these lessons, feeling that he was thus
working for his future family. To acknowledge this service, he was
invited, by advice of Theodose to Flavie, to dine at the Collevilles'
every Thursday, where la Peyrade always met him. Flavie was usually
making either a purse or slippers or a cigar-case for the happy young
man, who would say, deprecatingly:--

"I am only too well rewarded, madame, by the happiness I feel in being
useful to you."

"We are not rich, monsieur," replied Colleville, "but, God bless me! we
are not ungrateful."

Old Phellion would rub his hands as he listened to his son's account
of these evenings, beholding his dear and noble Felix already wedded to
Celeste.

But Celeste, the more she loved Felix, the more grave and serious she
became with him; partly because her mother sharply lectured her, saying
to he