He murmured an incoherence or two, and there was then a long silence. Presently his head knocked sharply against the lintel. I roused him. "Master, it won't be good for us to sit any longer in the moonshine." He turned a glazed look on me. "Minerva's Owl," said he, "I am quite aware of it." He rose and lumbered into the inn, and I, having guided him up the narrow staircase to his room, descended to my bunk in a corner of the tiny salon. My sleeping arrangements were always sketchy. In the morning when I questioned him as to our departure from Aix, he affected not to understand, and told me that I had been dreaming and that the moonshine had affected my brain. "Consider, my son," said he, "that when I returned last night, I found you fast asleep on the doorstep, and you never woke up till this morning." From this I gathered that for the second time he had dosed the book of his life to my prying though innocent eyes. I also learned the peculiar difference between Philip drunk and Philip sober. When our engagement at Aix was at an end, the proprietor of the restaurant desired to renew it, but Paragot declined. The sick violinist whom we had replaced had recovered and Paragot had seen him on the quay looking through the railings with the hungry eyes of a sort of musical Enoch Arden. Blanquette had some little difficulty in preventing him from rushing out there and then and delivering his fiddle into the other's hands. It was necessary to be reasonable, she said. "_Nom de Dieu!_" he cried, "if I were reasonable I should be lost. Reason would set me down in Paris with gloves and an umbrella. Reason would implant a sunny smile on my face above the red ribbon of the Legion of Honour. It would marry me to the daughter of one of my _confrères_ at the Académie des Beaux Arts. It would make me procreate my species, _cré nom de Dieu_! It would make me send you and Asticot and Narcisse to the devil. If I were reasonable I should not be Paragot. The man who lives according to reason has the heart of a sewing-machine."