“Yes, let the dear child give us her little toast,” said la Peyrade to Madame Colleville.

“Go on, my daughter,” cried Colleville; “here’s the hermitage still to be drunk—­and it’s hoary with age,” he added.

“To my kind godmother!” said the girl, lowering her glass respectfully before Madame Thuillier, and holding it towards her.

The poor woman, startled, looked through a veil of tears first at her husband, and then at Brigitte; but her position in the family was so well known, and the homage paid by innocence to weakness had something so beautiful about it, that the emotion was general; the men all rose and bowed to Madame Thuillier.

“Ah!  Celeste, I would I had a kingdom to lay at your feet,” murmured Felix Phellion.

The worthy Phellion wiped away a tear.  Dutocq himself was moved.

“Oh! the charming child!” cried Mademoiselle Thuillier, rising, and going round to kiss her sister-in-law.

“My turn now!” said Colleville, posing like an athlete.  “Now listen:  To friendship!  Empty your glasses; refill your glasses.  Good!  To the fine arts,—­the flower of social life!  Empty your glasses; refill your glasses.  To another such festival on the day after election!”

“What is that little bottle you have there?” said Dutocq to Mademoiselle Thuillier.

“That,” she said, “is one of my three bottles of Madame Amphoux’ liqueur; the second is for the day of Celeste’s marriage; the third for the day on which her first child is baptized.”

“My sister is losing her head,” remarked Thuillier to Colleville.

The dinner ended with a toast, offered by Thuillier, but suggested to him by Theodose at the moment when the malaga sparkled in the little glasses like so many rubies.

“Colleville, messieurs, has drunk to friendship.  I now drink, in this most generous wine, To my friends!”

An hurrah, full of heartiness, greeted that fine sentiment, but Dutocq remarked aside to Theodose:—­

“It is a shame to pour such wine down the throats of such people.”

“Ah! if we could only make such wine as that!” cried Zelie, making her glass ring by the way in which she sucked down the Spanish liquid.  “What fortunes we could get!”

Zelie had now reached her highest point of incandescence, and was really alarming.

“Yes,” replied Minard, “but ours is made.”

“Don’t you think, sister,” said Brigitte to Madame Thuillier, “that we had better take coffee in the salon?”

Madame Thuillier obediently assumed the air of mistress of the house, and rose.

“Ah! you are a great wizard,” said Flavie Colleville, accepting la Peyrade’s arm to return to the salon.

“And yet I care only to bewitch you,” he answered.  “I think you more enchanting than ever this evening.”

“Thuillier,” she said, to evade the subject, “Thuillier made to think himself a political character! oh! oh!”