Newman wondered whom she was talking about, but just then an opening among his neighbors enabled him to turn away, and he said to himself that she was probably paying a tribute to British propriety and playing at tender solicitude about her papa.  Was that miserable old man still treading the path of vice in her train?  Was he still giving her the benefit of his experience of affairs, and had he crossed the sea to serve as her interpreter?  Newman walked some distance farther, and then began to retrace his steps taking care not to traverse again the orbit of Mademoiselle Nioche.  At last he looked for a chair under the trees, but he had some difficulty in finding an empty one.  He was about to give up the search when he saw a gentleman rise from the seat he had been occupying, leaving Newman to take it without looking at his neighbors.  He sat there for some time without heeding them; his attention was lost in the irritation and bitterness produced by his recent glimpse of Miss Noemie’s iniquitous vitality.  But at the end of a quarter of an hour, dropping his eyes, he perceived a small pug-dog squatted upon the path near his feet—­a diminutive but very perfect specimen of its interesting species.  The pug was sniffing at the fashionable world, as it passed him, with his little black muzzle, and was kept from extending his investigation by a large blue ribbon attached to his collar with an enormous rosette and held in the hand of a person seated next to Newman.  To this person Newman transferred his attention, and immediately perceived that he was the object of all that of his neighbor, who was staring up at him from a pair of little fixed white eyes.  These eyes Newman instantly recognized; he had been sitting for the last quarter of an hour beside M. Nioche.  He had vaguely felt that some one was staring at him.  M. Nioche continued to stare; he appeared afraid to move, even to the extent of evading Newman’s glance.

“Dear me,” said Newman; “are you here, too?” And he looked at his neighbor’s helplessness more grimly than he knew.  M. Nioche had a new hat and a pair of kid gloves; his clothes, too, seemed to belong to a more recent antiquity than of yore.  Over his arm was suspended a lady’s mantilla—­a light and brilliant tissue, fringed with white lace—­which had apparently been committed to his keeping; and the little dog’s blue ribbon was wound tightly round his hand.  There was no expression of recognition in his face—­or of anything indeed save a sort of feeble, fascinated dread; Newman looked at the pug and the lace mantilla, and then he met the old man’s eyes again.  “You know me, I see,” he pursued.  “You might have spoken to me before.”  M. Nioche still said nothing, but it seemed to Newman that his eyes began faintly to water.  “I didn’t expect,” our hero went on, “to meet you so far from—­from the Cafe de la Patrie.”  The old man remained silent, but decidedly Newman had touched the source of tears.  His neighbor sat staring and Newman added, “What’s the matter, M. Nioche?  You used to talk—­to talk very prettily.  Don’t you remember you even gave lessons in conversation?”