“Ah! and you know it as well as A, B, C,” playfully retorted Clotilde.

“Well, guess which one is our landlord?”

“Which one?”

“Ma foi! how do I know?  I had to wait a shameful long time to see Monsieur le prince,—­just because I am a De Grapion, I know.  When at last I saw him, he says, ‘Madame, this is the other Honore Grandissime.’  There, you see we are the victims of a conspiracy; if I go to the other, he will send me back to the first.  But, Clotilde, my darling,” cried the beautiful speaker, beamingly, “dismiss all fear and care; we shall have no more trouble about it.”

“And how, indeed, do you know that?”

“Something tells it to me in my ear.  I feel it!  Trust in Providence, my child.  Look at me, how happy I am; but you—­you never trust in Providence.  That is why we have so much trouble,—­because you don’t trust in Providence.  Oh!  I am so hungry, let us have dinner.”

“What sort of a person is M. Grandissime in his appearance?” asked Clotilde, over their feeble excuse for a dinner.

“What sort?  Do you imagine I had nothing better to do than notice whether a Grandissime is good-looking or not?  For all I know to the contrary, he is—­some more rice, please, my dear.”

But this light-heartedness did not last long.  It was based on an unutterable secret, all her own, about which she still had trembling doubts; this, too, notwithstanding her consultation of the dark oracles.  She was going to stop that.  In the long run, these charms and spells themselves bring bad luck.  Moreover, the practice, indulged in to excess, was wicked, and she had promised Clotilde,—­that droll little saint,—­to resort to them no more.  Hereafter, she should do nothing of the sort, except, to be sure, to take such ordinary precautions against misfortune as casting upon the floor a little of whatever she might be eating or drinking to propitiate M. Assonquer.  She would have liked, could she have done it without fear of detection, to pour upon the front door-sill an oblation of beer sweetened with black molasses to Papa Lebat (who keeps the invisible keys of all the doors that admit suitors), but she dared not; and then, the hound would surely have licked it up.  Ah me! was she forgetting that she was a widow?

She was in poor plight to meet the all but icy gray morning; and, to make her misery still greater, she found, on dressing, that an accident had overtaken her, which she knew to be a trustworthy sign of love grown cold.  She had lost—­alas! how can we communicate it in English!—­a small piece of lute-string ribbon, about so long, which she used for—­not a necktie exactly, but—­

And she hunted and hunted, and couldn’t bear to give up the search, and sat down to breakfast and ate nothing, and rose up and searched again (not that she cared for the omen), and struck the hound with the broom, and broke the broom, and hunted again, and looked out the front window, and saw the rain beginning to fall, and dropped into a chair—­crying, “Oh!  Clotilde, my child, my child! the rent collector will be here Saturday and turn us into the street!” and so fell a-weeping.