When I had lost them from my sight I cast a look around me, and noticed three people standing in line beneath the awning, and gazing upon me with interest. I recognized Monsieur, Madame, and Mademoiselle Lorinet. They were all smiling with the same look of contemptuous mockery. I bowed. The man alone returned my salute, raising his hat. By some strange freak of fate, Berthe was again wearing a blue dress. I went back in the direction of the Rue du Four, happy, though at my wits’ end, forming projects that were mutually destructive; now expatiating in the seventh heaven, now loading myself with the most appalling curses. I slipped along the streets, concealed beneath my umbrella, for the rain was falling; a great storm-cloud had burst over Bourges, and I blessed the rain which gave me a chance to hide my face. From the banks of the Voizelle to the old quarter around the cathedral is a rather long walk. When I turned from the Rue Moyenne, the Boulevard des Italiens of Bourges, into the Rue du Four, a blazing sun was drying the rain on the roofs, and the cuckoo clock at M. Festuquet’s--a neighbor of my uncle--was striking the hour of meeting. I had not been three minutes at the garden door, a key to which had been given me by Madeleine, when M. Charnot appeared with Jeanne on his arm. “To think that I’ve forgotten my overshoes, which I never fail to take with me to the country!” “The country, father?” said Jeanne, “why, Bourges is a city!--” “To be sure--to be sure,” answered M. Charnot, who feared he had hurt my feelings. He put on his spectacles and began to study the old houses around him. “Yes, a city; really quite a city.” I do not remember what commonplace I stammered. Little did I care for M. Charnot’s overshoes or the honor of Bourges at that moment! On the other side of the wall, a few feet off, I felt the presence of M. Mouillard. I reflected that I should have to open the door and launch the Academician, without preface, into the presence of the lawyer, stake my life’s happiness, perhaps, on my uncle’s first impressions, play at any rate the decisive move in the game which had been so disastrously opened. Jeanne, though she did her best to hide it, was extremely nervous. I felt her hand tremble in mine as I took it. “Trust in God!” she whispered, and aloud: “Open the door.” I turned the key in the lock. I had arranged that Madeleine should go at once to M. Mouillard and tell him that there were some strangers waiting in the garden. But either she was not on the lookout, or she did not at once perceive us, and we had to wait a few minutes at the bottom of the lawn before any one came. I hid myself behind the trees whose leafage concealed the wall.