e. Madame de Verneuil never
forgave him the lie. She is gentle, my son, but she has character."

It was after that, I think, that the frozen look came into her eyes.
Thenceforward she was ice to the Comte de Verneuil, who for pleasant,
domestic companionship had to resort to his rare apes. No wonder his
madness took the form of the fixed idea that he had murdered Paragot.

"After all," he mused, "there must have been some good in the man. He
desired to make amends. He sent me the old contract, so that his wife
should not find it after his death. He confessed everything to her
before he died. There is a weak spot somewhere in the heart of the Devil
himself. I shouldn't wonder if he were devoted to a canary."

"Master," said I, suddenly bethinking me of the canary in the Rue des
Saladiers, "if you marry Madame de Verneuil, what will become of
Blanquette?"

"She will come and live with us, of course."

"H'm!" said I.

Respect forbade downright contradiction. I could only marvel mutely at
his pathetic ignorance of woman. Indeed, his reply gave me the shock of
an unexpected stone wall. He, who had but recently taught me the chart
of Fanchette's soul, to be unaware of elementary axioms! Did I not
remember Joanna's iciness at Aix-les-Bains when I told her of his
adoption of my zither-playing colleague? Was I not aware of poor
Blanquette's miserable jealousy of the beautiful lady who enquired for
her master? To bring these two together seemed, even to my boy's mind, a
ludicrous impossibility. Yet Paragot spoke with the unhumorous gravity
of a Methodist parson and the sincerity of a maiden lady with a mission
to obtain good situations for deserving girls; a man, so please you, who
had gone into the holes and corners of the Continent of Europe in search
of Truth, who had come face to face with human nature naked and
unashamed, who had run the gamut of femininity from our rare princess
Joanna to the murderer's widow of Prague; a man who ought to have had so
sensitive a perception that the most subtle and elusive harmonies of
woman were as familiar to him as their providential love of babies or
their ineradicable passion for new hats.

He lit another cigarette, having dallied in a somewhat youthful fashion
with the newly acquired case, and blew two or three contented puffs.

"I believe in the Roman conception of the _familia_, my son. You and
Blanquette are included in mine. You being a man must go outside the
world and ma