And she pressed her pelerine over her heart once more--not perhaps on this occasion to restrain, but doubtless only to caress that generous heart. “Madame,” I said, shaking my finger at her, “you have wantonly aroused the indignation of an aged man. Be good enough to act in such a fashion that the old man may be able at least to forget your existence, and do not add fresh insults to those which I have already sustained from your lips. I give you fair warning that I shall never cease to look after Mademoiselle Alexandre; and that should you attempt to do her any harm, in any manner whatsoever, you will have serious reason to regret it!” The more I became excited, the more she became cool; and she answered in a tone of superb indifference: “Monsieur, I am much too well informed in regard to the nature of the interest which you take in this young girl, not to withdraw her immediately from that very surveillance with which you threaten me. After observing the more than equivocal intimacy in which you are living with your housekeeper, I ought to have taken measures at once to render it impossible for you ever to come into contact with an innocent child. In the future I shall certainly do it. If up to this time I have been too trustful, it is for Mademoiselle Alexandre, and not for you, to reproach me with it. But she is too artless and too pure--thanks to me!--ever to have suspected the nature of that danger into which you were trying to lead her. I scarcely suppose that you will place me under the necessity of enlightening her upon the subject.” “Come, my poor old Bonnard,” I said to myself, as I shrugged my shoulders--“so you had to live as long as this in order to learn for the first time exactly what a wicked woman is. And now your knowledge of the subject is complete.” I went out without replying; and I had the pleasure of observing, from the sudden flush which overspread the face of the schoolmistress, that my silence had wounded her far more than my words. As I passed through the court I looked about me in every direction for Jeanne. She was watching for me, and she ran to me. “If anybody touches one little hair of your head, Jeanne, write to me! Good-bye!” “No, not good-bye.” I replied, “Well, no--not good-bye! Write to me!” I went straight to Madame de Gabry’s residence. “Madame is at Rome with Monsieur. Did not Monsieur know it?” “Why, yes,” I replied. “Madame wrote to me.”... She had indeed written to me in regard to her leaving home; but my head must have become very much confused, so that I had forgotten all about it. The servant seemed to be of the same opinion, for he looked at me in a way that seemed to signify, “Monsieur Bonnard is doting”--and he leaned down over the balustrade of the stairway to see if I was not going to do something extraordinary before I got to the bottom. But I descended the stairs rationally enough; and then he drew back his head in disappointment.