sure you still are fond of me; do me one last service. You must manage
to put me up here without my uncle knowing it."

"Without his knowing it, Monsieur Fabien!"

"Yes, say in the library; he never goes in there. From there I can study
him, and watch him, without his seeing me, since he is so irritable and
so easily upset, and as soon as you see an opportunity I shall make use
of it. A sign from you, and down I come."

"Really, Monsieur Fabien--"

"It must be done, Madeleine; I must manage to speak to him before ten
o'clock to-morrow morning, for my bride is coming."

"The Parisienne? She coming here!"

"Yes, with her father, by the train which gets in at six minutes past
nine to-morrow."

"Good God! is it possible?"

"To see you, Madeleine; to see my uncle, to make my peace with him. Isn't
it kind of her?"

"Kind? Monsieur Fabien! I tremble to think of what will happen. All the
same, I shall be glad to have a sight of your young lady, of course."

And so we settled that Madeleine was not to say a word to my uncle about
my being in Bourges, within a few feet of him. If she perceived any break
in the gloom which enveloped M. Mouillard, she was to let me know; if I
were obliged to put off my interview to the morrow, and to pass the night
on the sofa-bed in the library, she was to bring me something to eat, a
rug, and "the pillow you used in your holidays when you were a boy."

I was installed then in the big library on the first-floor, adjoining the
drawing-room, its other door opening on the passage opposite M.
Mouillard's door, and its two large windows on the garden. What a look of
good antique middle-class comfort there was about it, from the floor of
bees'-waxed oak, with its inequalities of level, to the four bookcases
with glass doors, surmounted by four bronzed busts of Herodotus, Homer,
Socrates, and Marmontel! Nothing had been moved; the books were still in
the places where I had known them for twenty years; Voltaire beside
Rousseau, the Dictionary of Useful Knowledge, and Rollin's Ancient
History, the slim, well bound octavos of the Meditations of St. Ignatius,
side by side with an enormous quarto on veterinary surgery.

The savage arrows, said to be poisoned, which always used to frighten me
so much, were still arranged like a peacock's tail over the mantel-shelf,
each end of which was adorned by the same familiar lumps of white coral.
The musical-box, which I was not allowed to touch till I was