"You, madame?" said Antoine, gazing fixedly at her. "Yes, for me to thank you for the two months you have allowed me to pass here. The idea of never seeing the house again was very painful to me; it will be less so henceforth, and I shall look back to this brief stay here as to a last pleasant dream which will count for much in my life and for which I shall be indebted to you." Madame Thierry spoke in a sweet voice and with a refined accent which had always made her very fascinating. In his moments of spleen Monsieur Antoine sourly called her the _fine talker._ He felt none the less the ascendancy of that still fresh voice, which caressed his ear with mild and almost respectful words. He had but little comprehension of sentimental refinement, but it seemed to him that he had found the submissive instinct of which he was so greedy. "Come, Madame André," he said, with the surly manner he always assumed when his ill humor was beginning to retreat, "you know how to say all you want to say; but, in reality, you can't endure me, you may as well admit it!" "I do not hate any one, monsieur; but you force me to confess that I am afraid of you." Nothing could have been more adroit than that reply. To inspire fear was in Monsieur Antoine's opinion the noblest attribute of power. He softened as if by a miracle, and said in an almost good-humored tone: "Why in the devil are you afraid of me?" Madame André had the penetration of women who have lived much in society, and the shrewdness of a mother pleading her child's cause. She saw what a long step forward she had taken; she forgot, and this time most opportunely, that she was sixty years old, and boldly decided to play the coquette, although it cost her more dearly to employ that ruse with Monsieur Antoine than with any other man. "Brother," she said, "it rested entirely with you to retain my confidence. I do not reproach you for betraying it; your intentions were kind, but I misunderstood you. I was very young then, and in a plight where everything made me suspicious. I had had no experience of life. I thought that you were advising me to abandon André, whereas----" "Whereas I said to you in so many words: 'Save him!'" "Yes, that is true; your action was dictated by affection for him. Well, you see, I was blind, obstinate, whatever you choose to call it; but confess that you ought to have forgiven me for that, have treated me like the child I was, and become my brother once more as in the past." "You want me to admit that? Why, you always showed me the cold shoulder after that." "It was your place to laugh at my coldness, and to take my hand and say: 'Sister, you're a little fool; let us embrace and forget the past.'" "Ah! you think that I should have----" "The more entirely one is in the right, the more generous he should be!" "You talk that way now." "It is never too late to see what is right and to arrange things that are out of place." "So--now you are sorry that you wounded me?"