eceded one. By renouncing
my engagement as English master in Mdlle. Reuter's establishment, I had
voluntarily cut off 20l. from my yearly income; I had diminished my 60l.
per annum to 40l., and even that sum I now held by a very precarious
tenure.

It is some time since I made any reference to M. Pelet. The moonlight
walk is, I think, the last incident recorded in this narrative where
that gentleman cuts any conspicuous figure: the fact is, since that
event, a change had come over the spirit of our intercourse. He, indeed,
ignorant that the still hour, a cloudless moon, and an open lattice,
had revealed to me the secret of his selfish love and false friendship,
would have continued smooth and complaisant as ever; but I grew spiny as
a porcupine, and inflexible as a blackthorn cudgel; I never had a smile
for his raillery, never a moment for his society; his invitations to
take coffee with him in his parlour were invariably rejected, and
very stiffly and sternly rejected too; his jesting allusions to the
directress (which he still continued) were heard with a grim calm very
different from the petulant pleasure they were formerly wont to excite.
For a long time Pelet bore with my frigid demeanour very patiently;
he even increased his attentions; but finding that even a cringing
politeness failed to thaw or move me, he at last altered too; in
his turn he cooled; his invitations ceased; his countenance became
suspicious and overcast, and I read in the perplexed yet brooding aspect
of his brow, a constant examination and comparison of premises, and an
anxious endeavour to draw thence some explanatory inference. Ere long,
I fancy, he succeeded, for he was not without penetration; perhaps, too,
Mdlle. Zoraide might have aided him in the solution of the enigma; at
any rate I soon found that the uncertainty of doubt had vanished from
his manner; renouncing all pretence of friendship and cordiality, he
adopted a reserved, formal, but still scrupulously polite deportment.
This was the point to which I had wished to bring him, and I was now
again comparatively at my ease. I did not, it is true, like my position
in his house; but being freed from the annoyance of false professions
and double-dealing I could endure it, especially as no heroic sentiment
of hatred or jealousy of the director distracted my philosophical soul;
he had not, I found, wounded me in a very tender point, the wound was so
soon and so radically healed, leaving on