The Phellions looked at each other as if consulting how to reply.

“My son,” said Madame Phellion, “is not exactly ill; but since you mention a fact which is, I acknowledge, very strange and quite out of keeping with his nature and habits, I think it right to tell you that from the day when Celeste seemed to signify that all was at an end between them, a very extraordinary change has come over Felix, which is causing Monsieur Phellion and myself the deepest anxiety.”

“Yes, madame,” said Phellion, “the young man is certainly not in his normal condition.”

“But what is the matter with him?” asked the countess, anxiously.

“The night of that scene with Celeste,” replied Phellion, “after his return home, he wept a flood of hot tears on his mother’s bosom, and gave us to understand that the happiness of his whole life was at an end.”

“And yet,” said Madame de Godollo, “nothing very serious happened; but lovers always make the worst of things.”

“No doubt,” said Madame Phellion; “but since that night Felix has not made the slightest allusion to his misfortune, and the next day he went back to his work with a sort of frenzy.  Does that seem natural to you?”

“It is capable of explanation; work is said to be a great consoler.”

“That is most true,” said Phellion; “but in Felix’s whole personality there is something excited, and yet repressed, which is difficult to describe.  You speak to him, and he hardly seems to hear you; he sits down to table and forgets to eat, or takes his food with an absent-mindedness which the medical faculty consider most injurious to the process of digestion; his duties, his regular occupations, we have to remind him of—­him, so extremely regular, so punctual!  The other day, when he was at the Observatory, where he now spends all his evenings, only coming home in the small hours, I took it upon myself to enter his room and examine his papers.  I was terrified, madame, at finding a paper covered with algebraic calculations which, by their vast extent appeared to me to go beyond the limits of the human intellect.”

“Perhaps,” said the countess, “he is on the road to some great discovery.”

“Or to madness,” said Madame Phellion, in a low voice, and with a heavy sigh.

“That is not probable,” said Madame de Godollo; “with an organization so calm and a mind so well balanced, he runs but little danger of that misfortune.  I know myself of another danger that threatens him to-morrow, and unless we can take some steps this evening to avert it, Celeste is positively lost to him.”

“How so?” said the husband and wife together.

“Perhaps you are not aware,” replied the countess, “that Thuillier and his sister have made certain promises to Monsieur de la Peyrade about Celeste?”

“We suspected as much,” replied Madame Phellion.