“Well, haven’t you shaved yet?” she said, appearing at his door.

Her sudden presence made the old man start violently; and from being pale and cast down he grew red for an instant, without, however, daring to complain of her treatment.

“Your breakfast is waiting,” she added.  “You can come down as you are, in dressing-gown and slippers; for you’ll breakfast alone, I can tell you.”

Without waiting for an answer, she disappeared.  To make him breakfast alone was the punishment he dreaded most; he loved to talk to her as he ate his meals.  When he got to the foot of the staircase he was taken with a fit of coughing; for emotion excited his catarrh.

“Cough away!” said Flore in the kitchen, without caring whether he heard her or not.  “Confound the old wretch! he is able enough to get over it without bothering others.  If he coughs up his soul, it will only be after—­”

Such were the amenities the Rabouilleuse addressed to Rouget when she was angry.  The poor man sat down in deep distress at a corner of the table in the middle of the room, and looked at his old furniture and the old pictures with a disconsolate air.

“You might at least have put on a cravat,” said Flore.  “Do you think it is pleasant for people to see such a neck as yours, which is redder and more wrinkled than a turkey’s?”

“But what have I done?” he asked, lifting his big light-green eyes, full of tears, to his tormentor, and trying to face her hard countenance.

“What have you done?” she exclaimed.  “As if you didn’t know?  Oh, what a hypocrite!  Your sister Agathe—­who is as much your sister as I am sister of the tower of Issoudun, if one’s to believe your father, and who has no claim at all upon you—­is coming here from Paris with her son, a miserable two-penny painter, to see you.”

“My sister and my nephews coming to Issoudun!” he said, bewildered.

“Oh, yes! play the surprised, do; try to make me believe you didn’t send for them! sewing your lies with white bread, indeed!  Don’t fash yourself; we won’t trouble your Parisians—­before they set their feet in this house, we shall have shaken the dust of it off ours.  Max and I will be gone, never to return.  As for your will, I’ll tear it in quarters under your nose, and to your very beard—­do you hear?  Leave your property to your family, if you don’t think we are your family; and then see if you’ll be loved for yourself by a lot of people who have not seen you for thirty years,—­who in fact have never seen you!  Is it that sort of sister who can take my place?  A pinchbeck saint!”

“If that’s all, my little Flore,” said the old man, “I won’t receive my sister, or my nephews.  I swear to you this is the first word I have heard of their coming.  It is all got up by that Madame Hochon—­a sanctimonious old—­”

Max, who had overheard old Rouget’s words, entered suddenly, and said in a masterful tone,—­