That month of playful love rescued Miette from her mute despair.  She felt a revival of her affections, her happy childish carelessness, which had been held in check by the hateful loneliness in which she lived.  The certainty that she was loved by somebody, and that she was no longer alone in the world, enabled her to endure the persecutions of Justin and the Faubourg urchins.  A song of joy, whose glad notes drowned their hootings, now sounded in her heart.  She thought of her father with tender compassion, and did not now so frequently yield to dreams of bitter vengeance.  Her dawning love cooled her feverish broodings like the fresh breezes of the dawn.  At the same time she acquired the instinctive cunning of a young girl in love.  She felt that she must maintain her usual silent and rebellious demeanour if she were to escape Justin’s suspicions.  But, in spite of her efforts, her eyes retained a sweet unruffled expression when the lad bullied her; she was no longer able to put on her old black look of indignant anger.  One morning he heard her humming to herself at breakfast-time.

“You seem very gay, Chantegreil!” he said to her suspiciously, glancing keenly at her from his lowering eyes.  “I bet you’ve been up to some of your tricks again!”

She shrugged her shoulders, but she trembled inwardly; and she did all she could to regain her old appearance of rebellious martyrdom.  However, though Justin suspected some secret happiness, it was long before he was able to discover how his victim had escaped him.

Silvere, on his side, enjoyed profound happiness.  His daily meetings with Miette made his idle hours pass pleasantly away.  During his long silent companionship with aunt Dide, he recalled one by one his remembrances of the morning, revelling in their most trifling details.  From that time forward, the fulness of his heart cloistered him yet more in the lonely existence which he had adopted with his grandmother.  He was naturally fond of hidden spots, of solitary retirement, where he could give himself up to his thoughts.  At this period already he had eagerly begun to read all the old odd volumes which he could pick up at brokers’ shops in the Faubourg, and which were destined to lead him to a strange and generous social religion and morality.  His reading—­ill-digested and lacking all solid foundation—­gave him glimpses of the world’s vanities and pleasures, especially with regard to women, which would have seriously troubled his mind if his heart had not been contented.  When Miette came, he received her at first as a companion, then as the joy and ambition of his life.  In the evening, when he had retired to the little nook where he slept, and hung his lamp at the head of his strap-bedstead, he would find Miette on every page of the dusty old volume which he had taken at random from a shelf above his head and was reading devoutly.  He never came across a young girl, a good and beautiful creature, in his reading, without immediately identifying her