to help Time.  The very next day he returned—­on some pretence of business—­to the Hotel Duguesclin, and made his aunt’s room, rather than his aunt herself, a present of roses and geraniums tied up in a bouquet with a tricolor ribbon.  Virginie was in the room, sitting at the coarse sewing she liked to do for Madame Babette.  He saw her eyes brighten at the sight of the flowers:  she asked his aunt to let her arrange them; he saw her untie the ribbon, and with a gesture of dislike, throw it on the ground, and give it a kick with her little foot, and even in this girlish manner of insulting his dearest prejudices, he found something to admire.

“As he was coming out, Pierre stopped him.  The lad had been trying to arrest his cousin’s attention by futile grimaces and signs played off behind Virginie’s back:  but Monsieur Morin saw nothing but Mademoiselle Cannes.  However, Pierre was not to be baffled, and Monsieur Morin found him in waiting just outside the threshold.  With his finger on his lips, Pierre walked on tiptoe by his companion’s side till they would have been long past sight or hearing of the conciergerie, even had the inhabitants devoted themselves to the purposes of spying or listening.

“‘Chut!’ said Pierre, at last.  ‘She goes out walking.’

“‘Well?’ said Monsieur Morin, half curious, half annoyed at being disturbed in the delicious reverie of the future into which he longed to fall.

“‘Well!  It is not well.  It is bad.’

“’Why?  I do not ask who she is, but I have my ideas.  She is an aristocrat.  Do the people about here begin to suspect her?’

“‘No, no!’ said Pierre.  ’But she goes out walking.  She has gone these two mornings.  I have watched her.  She meets a man—­she is friends with him, for she talks to him as eagerly as he does to her—­mamma cannot tell who he is.’

“‘Has my aunt seen him?’

“’No, not so much as a fly’s wing of him.  I myself have only seen his back.  It strikes me like a familiar back, and yet I cannot think who it is.  But they separate with sudden darts, like two birds who have been together to feed their young ones.  One moment they are in close talk, their heads together chuckotting; the next he has turned up some bye-street, and Mademoiselle Cannes is close upon me—­has almost caught me.’

“‘But she did not see you?’ inquired Monsieur Morin, in so altered a voice that Pierre gave him one of his quick penetrating looks.  He was struck by the way in which his cousin’s features—­always coarse and common-place—­had become contracted and pinched; struck, too, by the livid look on his sallow complexion.  But as if Morin was conscious of the manner in which his face belied his feelings, he made an effort, and smiled, and patted Pierre’s head, and thanked him for his intelligence, and gave him a five-franc piece, and bade him go on with his observations of Mademoiselle Cannes’ movements, and report all to him.