ine with me some Sunday, without ceremony.
Berenice's 'souffle au fromage' is something delicious! Let Monsieur le
Superieur come in."

M. Violette took his departure, displeased at his useless visit and
irritated against Uncle Isidore, who had been hardly civil.

"That man is a perfect egotist," thought he, sadly; "and that girl has
him in her clutches. My poor Amedee will have nothing from him."

Amedee himself was not interested in his uncle's fortune. He was just
then a pupil in the fourth grade, which follows the same studies as at
the Lycee Henri IV. Having suddenly grown tall, he was annoyed at wearing
short trousers, and had already renounced all infantile games. The
dangling crows which illustrated the pages of his Burnouf grammar were
all dated the previous year, and he had entirely renounced feeding
silkworms in his desk. Everything pointed to his not being a very
practical man. Geometry disgusted him, and as for dates, he could not
remember one. On holidays he liked to walk by himself through quiet
streets; he read poems at the bookstalls, and lingered in the Luxembourg
Gardens to see the sun set. Destined to be a dreamer and a
sentimentalist--so much the worse for you, poor Amedee!

He went very often to the Gerards, but he no longer called his little
friends "thou." Louise was now seventeen years old, thin, without color,
and with a lank figure; decidedly far from pretty. People, in speaking of
her, began to say, "She has beautiful eyes and is an excellent musician."
Her sister Maria was twelve years old and a perfect little rosebud.

As to the neighbor's little girl, Rosine Combarieu, she had disappeared.
One day the printer suddenly departed without saying a word to anybody,
and took his child with him. The concierge said that he was concerned in
some political plot, and was obliged to leave the house in the night.
They believed him to be concealed in some small town.

Accordingly, Father Gerard was not angry with him for fleeing without
taking leave of him. The conspirator had kept all his prestige in the
eyes of the engraver, who, by a special run of ill-luck, was always
engaged by a publisher of Bonapartist works, and was busy at that moment
upon a portrait of the Prince Imperial, in the uniform of a corporal of
the Guards, with an immense bearskin cap upon his childish head.

Father Gerard was growing old. His beard, formerly of a reddish shade,
and what little hair there was remaining upon his