While I talked a little with Brulette, to do the honors of the house (which was quite a nice one, and I wanted her to take a fancy to it), Joseph, without a word to me, had set about tuning his flute. He found the damp weather had affected it, and he threw a handful of flax chips on the hearth to warm it. When the chips blazed up they cast a strong light upon his face, which was bent towards the fireplace; and I thought his look so strange that I called Brulette's attention to it in a low voice. "You may think," I said to her, "that he hides by day and wanders off at night solely to surfeit himself with that flute; but I know that he has in him or about him some secret that he does not tell us." "Bah!" she exclaimed, laughing; "just because Véret, the sabot-maker, fancies he saw him with a tall, dark man near the Râteau elm!" "Perhaps Véret dreamed that," I answered; "but as for me, I know what I saw and heard in the forest." "What did you see?" said José, suddenly, who had heard every word, though we spoke quite low. "What did you hear? You saw him who is my friend, but whom I cannot make known to you; and as for what you heard, you are going now to hear it again if it pleases you to do so." Thereupon he blew into his flute, his eye on fire and his face blazing as if with fever. Don't ask me what he played. I don't know if the devil would have understood it; as for me, I didn't, except that it seemed the same air I had heard among the brake, on the bagpipes. At that time I was so frightened that I didn't listen to it all; but now, whether it was that the music was longer, or that Joseph put some of his own into it, he never stopped fluting for a quarter of an hour, setting his fingers very delicately, never losing his breath, and getting such sounds out of his miserable reed that you would have thought, at times, there were three bagpipes going at once. At other times he played so softly that you could hear the cricket indoors and the nightingales without; and when José played low I confess I liked it,--though the whole together was so little like what we were accustomed to that it seemed to me a crazy racket. "Oh, oh!" I exclaimed, when he had finished; "that's a mad sort of music! Where the devil did you learn that? What is the use of it? Is there any meaning in it?" He did not answer, and seemed as if he had not heard me. He was looking at Brulette, who was leaning against a chair with her face turned to the wall. As she did not say a word, José was seized with a rush of anger either against her or against himself, and I saw him make a motion as if to break his flute; but just at that moment the girl looked round, and I was much surprised to see great tears running down her cheeks. Joseph ran to her and caught her hands. "Tell me what you feel, my darling!" he cried; "let me know if it is pity for me that makes you cry, or whether it is pleasure."