"Beast that I am!" muttered Leon, tearing his hair. "On the day when I see her again after three years' absence, I can think of nothing more soul-inspiring than showing her mummies!" He launched a kick at the triple coffin of the Colonel, saying: "I wish the devil had the confounded Colonel!"
"No!" cried Clementine with redoubled energy and emotion. "Do not curse him, Monsieur Leon! He has suffered so much! Ah! poor, poor unfortunate man!"
Mlle. Sambucco felt a little ashamed. She made excuses for her niece, and declared that never, since her tenderest childhood, had she manifested such extreme sensitiveness. M. and Mme. Renault, who had seen her grow up; Doctor Martout who had held the sinecure of physician to her; the architect, the notary, in a word, everybody present was plunged into a state of absolute stupefaction. Clementine was no sensitive plant. She was not even a romantic school girl. Her youth had not been nourished by Anne Radcliffe, she did not trouble herself about ghosts, and she would go through the house very tranquilly at ten o'clock at night without a candle. When her mother died, some months before Leon's departure, she did not wish to have any one share with her the sad satisfaction of watching and praying in the death-chamber.
"This will teach us," said the aunt, "how to stay up after ten o'clock. What! It is midnight, all to quarter of an hour! Come, my child; you will get better fast enough after you get to bed."
Clementine arose submissively, but at the moment of leaving the laboratory she retraced her steps, and with a caprice more inexplicable than her grief, she absolutely wished to see the mummy of the colonel again. Her aunt scolded in vain; in spite of the remarks of Mlle. Sambucco and all the persons present, she reopened the walnut box, kneeled down beside the mummy and kissed it on the forehead.
"Poor man!" said she, rising, "How cold he is! Monsieur Leon, promise me that if he is dead you will have him laid in consecrated ground!"
"As you please, Mademoiselle. I had intended to send him to the anthropological museum, with my father's permission; but you know that we can refuse you nothing."
They did not separate as gaily, by a good deal, as they had met. M. Renault and his son escorted Mlle. Sambucco and her niece to their door, and met the big colonel of cuirassiers who had been honoring Clementine with his attentions. The young girl tenderly pressed the arm of her betrothed and said: "Here is a man who never sees me without sighing. And what sighs! Gracious Heavens! It wouldn't take more than two to fill the sails of a a ship. The race of colonels has vastly degenerated since 1813. One doesn't see any more such fine looking ones as our unfortunate friend."
Leon agreed with all she said. But he did not exactly see how he had become the friend of a mummy for which he had just paid twenty-five louis. To divert the conversation, he said to Clementine: "I have not yet shown you all the nice things I brought. His majesty, the Emperor of all the Russias, made me a present of a little enamelled gold star hanging at the end of a ribbon. Do you like button-hole ribbons?"
"Oh, yes!" answered she, "the red ribbon of the Legion of Honor. Did you notice? The poor colonel still has a shred of one on his uniform, but the cross is there no longer. Those wicked Germans tore it away from him when they took him prisoner!"