every one who looked like a gentleman, as an aristocrat:  and Clement, depend upon it, looked a gentleman, whatever dress he wore.  Yet it was unwise to traverse Paris to his old friend the gardener’s grenier, so he had to loiter about, where I hardly know.  Only he did leave the Hotel Duguesclin, and he did not go to old Jacques, and there was not another house in Paris open to him.  At the end of two days, he had made out Pierre’s existence; and he began to try to make friends with the lad.  Pierre was too sharp and shrewd not to suspect something from the confused attempts at friendliness.  It was not for nothing that the Norman farmer lounged in the court and doorway, and brought home presents of galette.  Pierre accepted the galette, reciprocated the civil speeches, but kept his eyes open.  Once, returning home pretty late at night, he surprised the Norman studying the shadows on the blind, which was drawn down when Madame Babette’s lamp was lighted.  On going in, he found Mademoiselle Cannes with his mother, sitting by the table, and helping in the family mending.

“Pierre was afraid that the Norman had some view upon the money which his mother, as concierge, collected for her brother.  But the money was all safe next evening, when his cousin, Monsieur Morin Fils, came to collect it.  Madame Babette asked her nephew to sit down, and skilfully barred the passage to the inner door, so that Virginie, had she been ever so much disposed, could not have retreated.  She sat silently sewing.  All at once the little party were startled by a very sweet tenor voice, just close to the street window, singing one of the airs out of Beaumarchais’ operas, which, a few years before, had been popular all over Paris.  But after a few moments of silence, and one or two remarks, the talking went on again.  Pierre, however, noticed an increased air of abstraction in Virginie, who, I suppose, was recurring to the last time that she had heard the song, and did not consider, as her cousin had hoped she would have done, what were the words set to the air, which he imagined she would remember, and which would have told her so much.  For, only a few years before, Adam’s opera of Richard le Roi had made the story of the minstrel Blondel and our English Coeur de Lion familiar to all the opera-going part of the Parisian public, and Clement had bethought him of establishing a communication with Virginie by some such means.

“The next night, about the same hour, the same voice was singing outside the window again.  Pierre, who had been irritated by the proceeding the evening before, as it had diverted Virginie’s attention from his cousin, who had been doing his utmost to make himself agreeable, rushed out to the door, just as the Norman was ringing the bell to be admitted for the night.  Pierre looked up and down the street; no one else was to be seen.  The next day, the Norman mollified him somewhat by knocking at the door of the conciergerie, and begging