She could drink pretty fairly.'"

"Seeing that he was inclined to stray along the path of recollection I
spoke to him about something else, and then it was no longer a question
of you. He spent the whole evening with me and seemed as calm as the
Mediterranean. But what astonished me most was, that this calmness was
not at all affected. It was genuine indifference. At midnight we went
home. 'You seem surprised at my coolness in the position in which I find
myself,' said he to me, 'well, let me point out a comparison to you, my
dear fellow, it if is commonplace it has, at least, the merit of being
accurate. My heart is like a cistern the tap of which has been turned
on all night, in the morning not a drop of water is left. My heart is
really the same, last night I wept away all the tears that were left me.
It is strange, but I thought myself richer in grief, and yet by a single
night of suffering I am ruined, cleaned out. On my word of honor it is
as I say. Now, in the very bed in which I all but died last night beside
a woman who was no more moved than a stone, I shall sleep like a deck
laborer after a hard day's work, while she rests her head on the pillow
of another.' 'Hambug,' I thought to myself. 'I shall no sooner have left
him than he will be dashing his head against the wall.' However, I left
Rodolphe alone and went to my own room, but I did not go to bed. At
three in the morning I thought I heard a noise in Rodolphe's room and I
went down in a hurry, thinking to find him in a desperate fever."

"Well?" said Mimi.

"Well my dear, Rodolphe was sleeping, the bed clothes were quite in
order and everything proved that he had soon fallen asleep, and that his
slumbers had been calm."

"It is possible," said Mimi, "he was so worn out by the night before,
but the next day?"

"The next day Rodolphe came and roused me up early and we went and took
rooms in another house, into which we moved the same evening."

"And," asked Mimi, "what did he do on leaving the room we had occupied,
what did he say on abandoning the room in which he had loved me so?"

"He packed up his things quietly," replied Marcel, "and as he found in a
drawer a pair of thread gloves you had forgotten, as well as two or
three of your letters--"

"I know," said Mimi in a tone which seemed to imply, "I forgot them on
purpose so that he might have some souvenir of me left! What did he do
with them?" she added.

"If I remember rightly," said Marcel,