awning
light, with a swift foot to her cousin's chamber, the door of which
he had left open. The candle had burned down to the socket. Charles,
overcome by nature, was sleeping, dressed and sitting in an armchair
beside the bed, on which his head rested; he dreamed as men dream on
an empty stomach. Eugenie might weep at her ease; she might admire
the young and handsome face blotted with grief, the eyes swollen with
weeping, that seemed, sleeping as they were, to well forth tears.
Charles felt sympathetically the young girl's presence; he opened his
eyes and saw her pitying him.

"Pardon me, my cousin," he said, evidently not knowing the hour nor the
place in which he found himself.

"There are hearts who hear you, cousin, and _we_ thought you might need
something. You should go to bed; you tire yourself by sitting thus."

"That is true."

"Well, then, adieu!"

She escaped, ashamed and happy at having gone there. Innocence alone can
dare to be so bold. Once enlightened, virtue makes her calculations as
well as vice. Eugenie, who had not trembled beside her cousin, could
scarcely stand upon her legs when she regained her chamber. Her ignorant
life had suddenly come to an end; she reasoned, she rebuked herself with
many reproaches.

"What will he think of me? He will think that I love him!"

That was what she most wished him to think. An honest love has its own
prescience, and knows that love begets love. What an event for this poor
solitary girl thus to have entered the chamber of a young man! Are there
not thoughts and actions in the life of love which to certain souls bear
the full meaning of the holiest espousals? An hour later she went to
her mother and dressed her as usual. Then they both came down and sat
in their places before the window waiting for Grandet, with that cruel
anxiety which, according to the individual character, freezes the
heart or warms it, shrivels or dilates it, when a scene is feared, a
punishment expected,--a feeling so natural that even domestic animals
possess it, and whine at the slightest pain of punishment, though they
make no outcry when they inadvertently hurt themselves. The goodman came
down; but he spoke to his wife with an absent manner, kissed Eugenie,
and sat down to table without appearing to remember his threats of the
night before.

"What has become of my nephew? The lad gives no trouble."

"Monsieur, he is asleep," answered Nanon.

"So much the better; he won't wan