“What! they let lodgings?—furnished?”
Thélénie shrugged her shoulders impatiently and left her husband, saying:
“Don’t forget what I have told you to do, monsieur!”
Chamoureau left the house by the fine avenue of lindens of which he was so proud. Reflecting on the instructions his wife had given him, he said to himself:
“I shall find the child; that ought not to be difficult. But as for the dog—it seems that he’s very savage; I’ll inquire about him, but I won’t try to come to close quarters with him. What’s the use; he’ll never admit his culpability toward my wife.”
Communing thus with himself, the new landed proprietor made slow progress, because he halted at every tree on the avenue, examined it and walked around it admiringly, murmuring:
“This fellow must be at least fifty years old—what do I say? eighty years! perhaps more! How in the devil can one tell the age of a tree? That’s something the geologists have never thought of—the arborists, I should say, or, better still, the wood-cutters. And yet it’s a very important matter. When a man can say: ‘I have on my estate several centuries of trees,’ that should add immensely to its value. Let us see, let us see; that is something worth finding out—how to tell the age of a tree! Suppose I should find it out! I should think that I might then offer myself as a candidate for the Academy; I should be justified!”
Engrossed by his study of the trees, Chamoureau had not noticed a man who had entered his avenue and was walking toward him, looking to right and left, like one who is determined to observe everything.
This individual, whose dress was modest and suggested poverty rather than elegance, had nevertheless an arrogant manner and a self-assured bearing; his dirty round hat was perched on the right side of his head in true swaggering style, and the thick stick which he held in his hand was made to perform evolutions and revolutions which might have led one to think that he had been a drum-major. Adding to all this the face of a bird of prey, you will at once recognize Croque, Thélénie’s brother, less dilapidated than at the time of his visit to his sister some months before, but not apparently in the most prosperous circumstances.
Croque approached Chamoureau, who, on raising his eyes, was vastly surprised to see within a few feet of him that gallows-bird, who tried to salute him gracefully, as he said: