“I mean a force that will make the bourgeois go down into their cellars and hide, pale with fear, behind their barrels of wine and their heaps of gold!” cried M. Poupin, rolling terrible eyes. “And in this country, I hope, in their coal-bins. _La-la_, we shall find them even there,” his wife remarked. “’89 was an irresistible force,” said M. Poupin. “I believe you would have thought so if you had been there.” “And so was the entrance of the Versaillais, which sent you over here ten years ago,” the young man returned. He saw Hyacinth was watching him and he met his eyes, smiling a little, in a way that added to our hero’s interest. “_Pardon, pardon_, I resist!” cried Eustache Poupin, glaring, in his improvised nightcap, out of his sheets; and Madame repeated that they resisted—she believed well that they resisted! The young man burst out laughing; whereupon his host declared with a dignity which even his recumbent position didn’t abate that it was really frivolous of him to ask such questions as that, knowing as he did—what he did know. “Yes, I know—I know,” said the young man good-naturedly, lowering his arms and thrusting his hands into his pockets while he stretched his long legs a little. “But everything is yet to be tried.” “Oh the trial will be on a great scale—_soyez tranquille_! It will be one of those experiments that constitute a proof.” Hyacinth wondered what they were talking about, and perceived that it must be something important, for the stranger was not a man who would take an interest in anything else. Hyacinth was immensely struck with him, could see he was remarkable, and felt slightly aggrieved that he should be a stranger: that is that he should be apparently a familiar of Lisson Grove and yet that M. Poupin should not have thought his young friend from Lomax Place worthy up to this time to be made acquainted with him. I know not to what degree the visitor in the other chair discovered these reflexions in Hyacinth’s face, but after a moment, looking across at him, he said in a friendly yet just slightly diffident way, a way our hero liked: “And do you know too?” “Do I know what?” asked Hyacinth in wonder. “Oh, if you did you would!” the young man exclaimed and laughed again. Such a rejoinder from any one else would have irritated our sensitive hero, but it only made him more curious about his interlocutor, whose laugh was loud and extraordinarily gay. “_Mon ami_, you ought to present _ces messieurs_,” Madame Poupin remarked. “_Ah ça_, is that the way you trifle with state secrets?” her husband cried without heeding her. Then he went on in a different tone: “M. Hyacinthe is a gifted child, _un enfant très-doué_, in whom I take a tender interest—a child who has an account to settle. Oh, a thumping big one! Isn’t it so, _mon petit_?” This was very well meant, but it made Hyacinth blush, and, without knowing exactly what to say, he murmured shyly: “Oh, I only want them to let me alone!”