“I did not give him a rendezvous,” replied the poet, who had obtained Célestin’s assent to his smoking one of Toto’s cigarettes. “I shall not be there. Wolf will be there, and they will bore each other. Wolf is a dun, M. de Nani is a bore. I always appoint my duns and bores to meet each other at the Café de la Paix, the Café Américain, or the Grand Café. They dine together and speak ill of me whilst I am dining at Foyot’s, or the Café Anglais, or the Maison Dorée. I have made the fortune of three cafés by the people I have sent there to wait for me. They all ask for each other, and sit at the same table and wait for me; then they dine, and as a rule drink too much champagne to assuage themselves——” “_Mon Dieu_, Célestin!” cried Toto, seizing both her hands; “what is this? You are crying!” “I have just remembered Dodor,” sobbed Célestin. “I have left him shut up in my room, and, oh! should anyone open the door and leave it so, Mme. Liard’s cat may kill him. _What_ shall I do?” “Why, the girl has a baby!” thought Gaillard in astonishment. “Well, this is a nuisance!” said Toto in a voice of tribulation. “How old is Dodor, mademoiselle?” asked the poet. “He is two years and a little bit,” wept Célestin. “Ah, then be assured, mademoiselle, he is safe; cats never attack children of that age.” Toto made horrible faces at his companion. “He is not a child, monsieur,” murmured Dodor’s mistress—“I often wish that he were; he is my lark, and Mme. Liard’s cat may kill him.” Gaillard’s eyes became filled with tears; a moment more, and he might have allowed himself the pleasure of weeping. “Did you lock your door?” asked Toto. “Why, yes, I did!” cried Célestin, brightening through her tears and putting her hand into the back pocket of her dress; “and the key—I have it. Oh, how relieved I feel! Still, I ought not to have forgotten him; he was a treasure given me by the good God to keep. Ah, monsieur,” she said, turning to Gaillard, “you do not know how I love Dodor.” Gaillard’s lachrymal works again began to threaten. “Here we are,” said Toto, and the train drew up at Montmorency, with the trees waving in the wind. They came along the white road leading to the little town, a boy hired for half a franc carrying the basket, Gaillard threatening him with untold terrors if he dropped it and herding him with his crook-handled stick. The blue sky was dotted here and there with little white clouds, like a sparse flock of white lambs tended by some invisible shepherd who had gone to sleep in the azure fields and left them to graze at their own sweet will. Beneath the sky and far away stretched the country, green as only April makes it, spread with apple blossom, the air filled with a sound one never hears in Paris—the hum of the wind in a million trees.