“He may think,” said Thuillier one day to Minard, “that my sister will put him in her will; he doesn’t know her.”

This speech, inspired by Theodose himself, calmed the uneasiness of Minard “pere.”

“He is devoted to us,” said Brigitte to Madame Phellion; “but he certainly owes us a great deal of gratitude.  We have given him his lodging rent-free, and he dines with us almost every day.”

This speech of the old maid, also instigated by Theodose, went from ear to ear among the families who frequented the Thuillier salon, and dissipated all fears.  The young man called attention to the remarks of Thuillier and his sister with the servility of a parasite; when he played whist he justified the blunders of his dear, good friend, and he kept upon his countenance a smile, fixed and benign, like that of Madame Thuillier, ready to bestow upon all the bourgeois sillinesses of the brother and sister.

He obtained, what he wanted above all, the contempt of his true antagonists; and he used it as a cloak to hide his real power.  For four consecutive months his face wore a torpid expression, like that of a snake as it gulps and digests its prey.  But at times he would rush into the garden with Colleville or Flavie, to laugh and lay off his mask, and rest himself; or get fresh strength by giving way before his future mother-in-law to fits of nervous passion which either terrified or deeply touched her.

“Don’t you pity me?” he cried to her the evening before the preparatory sale of the house, when Thuillier was to make the purchase at seventy-five thousand francs.  “Think of a man like me, forced to creep like a cat, to choke down every pointed word, to swallow my own gall, and submit to your rebuffs!”

“My friend! my child!” Flavie replied, undecided in mind how to take him.

These words are a thermometer which will show the temperature at which this clever manipulator maintained his intrigue with Flavie.  He kept her floating between her heart and her moral sense, between religious sentiments and this mysterious passion.

During this time Felix Phellion was giving, with a devotion and constancy worthy of all praise, regular lessons to young Colleville.  He spent much of his time upon these lessons, feeling that he was thus working for his future family.  To acknowledge this service, he was invited, by advice of Theodose to Flavie, to dine at the Collevilles’ every Thursday, where la Peyrade always met him.  Flavie was usually making either a purse or slippers or a cigar-case for the happy young man, who would say, deprecatingly:—­

“I am only too well rewarded, madame, by the happiness I feel in being useful to you.”

“We are not rich, monsieur,” replied Colleville, “but, God bless me! we are not ungrateful.”

Old Phellion would rub his hands as he listened to his son’s account of these evenings, beholding his dear and noble Felix already wedded to Celeste.