to them from a distance
that breakfast was ready. At sight of her cousin, Sylvie's skin turned
green and yellow, her bile was in commotion. She looked at the floor of
the corridor and declared that Pierrette ought to rub it.

"I will rub it now if you wish," said the little angel, not aware of the
injury such work may do to a young girl.

The dining-room was irreproachably in order. Sylvie sat down and
pretended all through breakfast to want this, that, and the other thing
which she would never have thought of in a quieter moment, and which she
now asked for only to make Pierrette rise again and again just as the
child was beginning to eat her food. But such mere teasing was not
enough; she wanted a subject on which to find fault, and was angry with
herself for not finding one. She scarcely answered her brother's
silly remarks, yet she looked at him only; her eyes avoided Pierrette.
Pierrette was deeply conscious of all this. She brought the milk mixed
with cream for each cousin in a large silver goblet, after heating it
carefully in the _bain-marie_. The brother and sister poured in the
coffee made by Sylvie herself on the table. When Sylvie had carefully
prepared hers, she saw an atom of coffee-grounds floating on the
surface. On this the storm broke forth.

"What is the matter?" asked Rogron.

"The matter is that mademoiselle has put dust in my milk. Do you suppose
I am going to drink coffee with ashes in it? Well, I am not surprised;
no one can do two things at once. She wasn't thinking of the milk! a
blackbird might have flown through the kitchen to-day and she wouldn't
have seen it! how should she see the dust flying! and then it was my
coffee, ha! that didn't signify!"

As she spoke she was laying on the side of her plate the coffee-grounds
that had run through the filter.

"But, cousin, that is coffee," said Pierrette.

"Oh! then it is I who tell lies, is it?" cried Sylvie, looking at
Pierrette and blasting her with a fearful flash of anger from her eyes.

Organizations which have not been exhausted by powerful emotions often
have a vast amount of the vital fluid at their service. This phenomenon
of the extreme clearness of the eye in moments of anger was the more
marked in Mademoiselle Rogron because she had often exercised the power
of her eyes in her shop by opening them to their full extent for the
purpose of inspiring her dependents with salutary fear.

"You had better dare to give me the lie!" c