undemonstrative passions; and, above all, a capability of jealousy, of
which his dark oriental complexion must have been a type. I could fancy
that if he had married Virginie, he would have coined his life-blood for
luxuries to make her happy; would have watched over and petted her, at
every sacrifice to himself, as long as she would have been content to
live with him alone. But, as Pierre expressed it to me: 'When I saw what
my cousin was, when I learned his nature too late, I perceived that he
would have strangled a bird if she whom he loved was attracted by it from
him.'

"When Pierre had told Morin of his discovery, Morin sat down, as I said,
quite suddenly, as if he had been shot. He found out that the first
meeting between the Norman and Virginie was no accidental, isolated
circumstance. Pierre was torturing him with his accounts of daily
rendezvous: if but for a moment, they were seeing each other every day,
sometimes twice a day. And Virginie could speak to this man, though to
himself she was coy and reserved as hardly to utter a sentence. Pierre
caught these broken words while his cousin's complexion grew more and
more livid, and then purple, as if some great effect were produced on his
circulation by the news he had just heard. Pierre was so startled by his
cousin's wandering, senseless eyes, and otherwise disordered looks, that
he rushed into a neighbouring cabaret for a glass of absinthe, which he
paid for, as he recollected afterwards, with a portion of Virginie's five
francs. By-and-by Morin recovered his natural appearance; but he was
gloomy and silent; and all that Pierre could get out of him was, that the
Norman farmer should not sleep another night at the Hotel Duguesclin,
giving him such opportunities of passing and repassing by the
conciergerie door. He was too much absorbed in his own thoughts to repay
Pierre the half franc he had spent on the absinthe, which Pierre
perceived, and seems to have noted down in the ledger of his mind as on