"A score of times ere now I had seen them fall and receive no damage--this time, as Lucy Snowe's hapless luck would have it, they so fell that each clear pebble became a shivered and shapeless star.
"Now, indeed, dismay seized me--dismay and regret. I knew the value of these _lunettes_: M. Paul's sight was peculiar, not easily fitted, and these glasses suited him. I had heard him call them his treasures: as I picked them up, cracked and worthless, my hand trembled. Frightened through all my nerves I was to see the mischief I had done, but I think I was even more sorry than afraid. For some seconds I dared not look the bereaved Professor in the face; he was the first to speak.
"'_Là_!' he said: '_me voilà veuf de mes lunettes_! I think that Mademoiselle Lucy will now confess that the cord and gallows are amply earned; she trembles in anticipation of her doom. Ah, traitress, traitress! You are resolved to have me quite blind and helpless in your hands!'
"I lifted my eyes: his face, instead of being irate, lowering and furrowed, was overflowing with the smile, coloured with the bloom I had seen brightening it that evening at the Hotel Crécy. He was not angry--not even grieved. For the real injury he showed himself full of clemency; under the real provocation, patient as a saint."
"M. Paul came and stood behind me. He asked at what I was working; and I said I was making a watchguard. He asked, 'For whom?' And I answered, 'For a gentleman--one of my friends.'"
Whereupon M. Paul flies into a passion, and accuses Lucy of behaving to him, "'With what pungent vivacities--what an impetus of mutiny--what a _fougue_ of injustice.'... '_Chut! à l'instant!_ There! there I went--_vive comme la poudre_.' He was sorry--he was very sorry: for my sake he grieved over the hopeless peculiarity. This _emportement_, this _chaleur_--generous, perhaps, but excessive--would yet, he feared, do me a mischief. It was a pity. I was not--he believed, in his soul--wholly without good qualities; and would I but hear reason, and be more sedate, more sober, less _en l'air_, less _coquette_, less taken by show, less prone to set an undue value on outside excellence--to make much of the attentions of people remarkable chiefly for so many feet of stature, _des couleurs de poupée, un nez plus ou moins bien fait_, and an enormous amount of fatuity--I might yet prove a useful, perhaps an exemplary character. But, as it was----And here the little man's voice was for a moment choked.