René felt himself blush as she spoke. In his excessive simplicity he feared lest the worthy widow might give him notice after his first meeting there with Suzanne. This ridiculous fear impelled him to visit his landlady immediately Madame Moraines had gone under pretence of speaking to her about some trifling matter he wanted done. She received him with the polite air of a woman who knows nothing, understands nothing, and has seen nothing, although she had been watching Suzanne's departure from her window, and had, with the practised eye of a Parisian, taken that lady's measure at a glance. Malvina now saw through it all--her lodger's visitor was a woman in the first ranks of Society, but he himself, although well dressed, showed by the cut of his beard, his hair, his walk and his whole appearance that he belonged to a lower station in life. The landlady thought that most probably the rent would be paid by the mistress, and not by the lover, and she regretted not having asked more than five hundred francs a month besides the fifty for attendance. The whole of the flat cost her fourteen hundred francs a year, and she paid her maid-of-all-work forty-five francs! No matter, she would make up for it in the extras--in the firing, the washing, and especially in the meals, if ever the young man asked her to provide lunch, as she had offered to do. 'She is an excellent woman, and very attentive,' said René, when Suzanne questioned him about Madame Raulet. Was the poet wrong in being so trustful? Of what use would it have been to indulge, as Claude would have done, in a pessimistic analysis of this woman's character, except to conjure up thoughts of blackmail and other dangers, all entirely imaginary, as it happened? For although Malvina was far from being a saint, she was at the same time a _bourgeoise_ who had a sincere hankering after respectability, and who proposed, as soon as she had made her little pile, to return to her native town of Tournon, and lead a life of absolute purity. The fear of seeing her name figure in the report of some evil-smelling case was sufficient to deter her from practising any pronounced form of imposition. So far did her love of respectability carry her that she wove a complicated web of falsehoods to the _concierge_ about her new lodger. She made out that Suzanne and René were a happy couple who lived in the country all the year round, and that they were distantly related to the late M. Raulet. Then, in order that he should have nothing whatever to do with the said _concierge_, she herself handed René two keys even before he had asked for them.