girl who now was watching her.

"Yes, let the dear child give us her little toast," said la Peyrade to
Madame Colleville.

"Go on, my daughter," cried Colleville; "here's the hermitage still to
be drunk--and it's hoary with age," he added.

"To my kind godmother!" said the girl, lowering her glass respectfully
before Madame Thuillier, and holding it towards her.

The poor woman, startled, looked through a veil of tears first at her
husband, and then at Brigitte; but her position in the family was so
well known, and the homage paid by innocence to weakness had something
so beautiful about it, that the emotion was general; the men all rose
and bowed to Madame Thuillier.

"Ah! Celeste, I would I had a kingdom to lay at your feet," murmured
Felix Phellion.

The worthy Phellion wiped away a tear. Dutocq himself was moved.

"Oh! the charming child!" cried Mademoiselle Thuillier, rising, and
going round to kiss her sister-in-law.

"My turn now!" said Colleville, posing like an athlete. "Now listen: To
friendship! Empty your glasses; refill your glasses. Good! To the
fine arts,--the flower of social life! Empty your glasses; refill your
glasses. To another such festival on the day after election!"

"What is that little bottle you have there?" said Dutocq to Mademoiselle
Thuillier.

"That," she said, "is one of my three bottles of Madame Amphoux'
liqueur; the second is for the day of Celeste's marriage; the third for
the day on which her first child is baptized."

"My sister is losing her head," remarked Thuillier to Colleville.

The dinner ended with a toast, offered by Thuillier, but suggested to
him by Theodose at the moment when the malaga sparkled in the little
glasses like so many rubies.

"Colleville, messieurs, has drunk to _friendship_. I now drink, in this
most generous wine, To my friends!"

An hurrah, full of heartiness, greeted that fine sentiment, but Dutocq
remarked aside to Theodose:--

"It is a shame to pour such wine down the throats of such people."

"Ah! if we could only make such wine as that!" cried Zelie, making her
glass ring by the way in which she sucked down the Spanish liquid. "What
fortunes we could get!"

Zelie had now reached her highest point of incandescence, and was really
alarming.

"Yes," replied Minard, "but ours is made."

"Don't you think, sister," said Brigitte to Madame Thuillier, "that we
had better take coffee in the salon?"

Madame Thuillier obediently assume