Sylvie was so lost in thought that she did not notice her brother coming down the path and bemoaning the injury the frost had done to his dahlias.

“Sylvie! what are you thinking about?  I thought you were looking at the fish; sometimes they jump out of the water.”

“No,” said Sylvie.

“How did you sleep?” and he began to tell her about his own dreams.  “Don’t you think my skin is getting tabid?”—­a word in the Rogron vocabulary.

Ever since Rogron had been in love,—­but let us not profane the word, —­ever since he had desired to marry Mademoiselle de Chargeboeuf, he was very uneasy about himself and his health.  At this moment Pierrette came down the garden steps and called to them from a distance that breakfast was ready.  At sight of her cousin, Sylvie’s skin turned green and yellow, her bile was in commotion.  She looked at the floor of the corridor and declared that Pierrette ought to rub it.

“I will rub it now if you wish,” said the little angel, not aware of the injury such work may do to a young girl.

The dining-room was irreproachably in order.  Sylvie sat down and pretended all through breakfast to want this, that, and the other thing which she would never have thought of in a quieter moment, and which she now asked for only to make Pierrette rise again and again just as the child was beginning to eat her food.  But such mere teasing was not enough; she wanted a subject on which to find fault, and was angry with herself for not finding one.  She scarcely answered her brother’s silly remarks, yet she looked at him only; her eyes avoided Pierrette.  Pierrette was deeply conscious of all this.  She brought the milk mixed with cream for each cousin in a large silver goblet, after heating it carefully in the bain-marie.  The brother and sister poured in the coffee made by Sylvie herself on the table.  When Sylvie had carefully prepared hers, she saw an atom of coffee-grounds floating on the surface.  On this the storm broke forth.

“What is the matter?” asked Rogron.

“The matter is that mademoiselle has put dust in my milk.  Do you suppose I am going to drink coffee with ashes in it?  Well, I am not surprised; no one can do two things at once.  She wasn’t thinking of the milk! a blackbird might have flown through the kitchen to-day and she wouldn’t have seen it! how should she see the dust flying! and then it was my coffee, ha! that didn’t signify!”

As she spoke she was laying on the side of her plate the coffee-grounds that had run through the filter.

“But, cousin, that is coffee,” said Pierrette.

“Oh! then it is I who tell lies, is it?” cried Sylvie, looking at Pierrette and blasting her with a fearful flash of anger from her eyes.

Organizations which have not been exhausted by powerful emotions often have a vast amount of the vital fluid at their service.  This phenomenon of the extreme clearness of the eye in moments of anger was the more marked in Mademoiselle Rogron because she had often exercised the power of her eyes in her shop by opening them to their full extent for the purpose of inspiring her dependents with salutary fear.