smother which, added to the stifling smell of quinces, was like to make
the air unbreathable.

Elodie complained that her throat was tickling her and begged to have
the window opened. But, directly the _citoyen_ Combalot had taken his
leave and the _citoyenne_ Gamelin had gone back to her stove, Evariste
repeated the same name in the girl's ear:

"Jacques Maubel," he reiterated.

She looked up at him in some surprise, and very quietly, still going on
cutting a quince in quarters:

"Well!... Jacques Maubel...?"

"He is the man."

"The man! what man?"

"You once gave him a red carnation."

She declared she did not understand and asked him to explain himself.

"That aristocrat! that _emigre_! that scoundrel!"

She shrugged her shoulders, and denied with the most natural air that
she had never known a Jacques Maubel.

It was true; she _had_ never known anyone of the name.

She denied she had ever given red carnations to anybody but Evariste;
but perhaps, on this point, her memory was not very good.

He had little experience of women and was far from having fully fathomed
Elodie's character; still, he deemed her quite capable of cajoling and
deceiving a cleverer man than himself.

"Why deny?" he asked. "I know all."

Again she asseverated she had never known anybody called Maubel. And,
having done peeling the quinces, she asked for a basin of water, because
her fingers were sticky. This Gamelin brought her, and, as she washed
her hands, she repeated her denials.

Again he repeated that he knew, and this time she made no reply.

She did not guess the object of her lover's question and she was a
thousand miles from suspecting that this Maubel, whom she had never
heard spoken of before, was to appear before the Revolutionary Tribunal;
she could make nothing of the suspicions with which she was assailed,
but she knew them to be unfounded. For this reason, having very little
hope of dissipating them, she had very little wish to do so either. She
ceased to deny having known Maubel, preferring to leave her jealous
lover to go astray on a false trail, when from one moment to the next,
the smallest incident might start him on the right road. Her little
lawyer's clerk of former days, now grown into a patriot dragoon and
lady-killer, had quarrelled by now with his aristocratic mistress.
Whenever he met Elodie in the street, he would gaze at her with a glance
that seemed to say:

"Come, my beauty! I feel sure I am