Newman slapped his knee.  “She is scared! she is scared!” he cried, exultantly.

“I was frightened too, sir,” said Mrs. Bread, “but I was also mightily vexed.  I took it very high with the porter and asked him by what right he used violence to an honorable Englishwoman who had lived in the house for thirty years before he was heard of.  Oh, sir, I was very grand, and I brought the man down.  He drew his bolts and let me out, and I promised the cabman something handsome if he would drive fast.  But he was terribly slow; it seemed as if we should never reach your blessed door.  I am all of a tremble still; it took me five minutes, just now, to thread my needle.”

Newman told her, with a gleeful laugh, that if she chose she might have a little maid on purpose to thread her needles; and he went away murmuring to himself again that the old woman was scared—­she was scared!

He had not shown Mrs. Tristram the little paper that he carried in his pocket-book, but since his return to Paris he had seen her several times, and she had told him that he seemed to her to be in a strange way—­an even stranger way than his sad situation made natural.  Had his disappointment gone to his head?  He looked like a man who was going to be ill, and yet she had never seen him more restless and active.  One day he would sit hanging his head and looking as if he were firmly resolved never to smile again; another he would indulge in laughter that was almost unseemly and make jokes that were bad even for him.  If he was trying to carry off his sorrow, he at such times really went too far.  She begged him of all things not to be “strange.”  Feeling in a measure responsible as she did for the affair which had turned out so ill for him, she could endure anything but his strangeness.  He might be melancholy if he would, or he might be stoical; he might be cross and cantankerous with her and ask her why she had ever dared to meddle with his destiny:  to this she would submit; for this she would make allowances.  Only, for Heaven’s sake, let him not be incoherent.  That would be extremely unpleasant.  It was like people talking in their sleep; they always frightened her.  And Mrs. Tristram intimated that, taking very high ground as regards the moral obligation which events had laid upon her, she proposed not to rest quiet until she should have confronted him with the least inadequate substitute for Madame de Cintre that the two hemispheres contained.

“Oh,” said Newman, “we are even now, and we had better not open a new account!  You may bury me some day, but you shall never marry me.  It’s too rough.  I hope, at any rate,” he added, “that there is nothing incoherent in this—­that I want to go next Sunday to the Carmelite chapel in the Avenue de Messine.  You know one of the Catholic ministers—­an abbe, is that it?—­I have seen him here, you know; that motherly old gentleman with the big waist-band.  Please ask him if I need a special leave to go in, and if I do, beg him to obtain it for me.”