"What did you say, my little Augustus, and what do you say, my little Madeleine?"
"Will madame the interpreter have the kindness to translate this pretty chirping into common language?" said Charles Dutertre to his wife, as he laughed merrily.
"Do you not understand the children, father?" said she to the old man.
"I thought I heard something about Sunday dress," said the old man, smiling, "but it was so complicated that I gave up all hope of comprehending it."
"It was something very like that,--come, come, only mothers and grandfathers understand little children," said Sophie, triumphantly.
"My dears, did you not say to your grandfather, 'To-day is Sunday because we have on our pretty new clothes'?"
The little blonde Madeleine opened her great blue eyes wide, and bowed her curly head in the affirmative.
"You are the Champollion of mothers!" cried Charles Dutertre, while the old man said to the two children:
"No, to-day is not Sunday, my children, but it is a feast-day."
Here Sophie was obliged to interfere again, and translate.
"They ask why it is a feast-day, father."
"Because we are going to have a friend visit us, and when a friend comes to see us, it is always a feast," replied the old man, with a smile somewhat constrained.
"Ah, we must not forget the purse," said Dutertre to his wife.
"Wait a moment," replied Sophie, gaily, to her husband, as she pointed to a little rose-coloured box on the table, "do you think that I, any more than you, could forget our good M. Pascal, our worthy benefactor?"
The grandfather, turning to little Madeleine, said, as he kissed her brow:
"We are expecting M. Pascal,--you know M. Pascal."
Madeleine again opened her great blue eyes; her face took on an expression almost of fear, and shaking her little curly head sadly, she said:
"But," said the young mother, "my dear Madeleine, why do you think that M. Pascal is bad?"
"Come, Sophie," said Charles Dutertre, smiling, "you are not going to stop to listen to this childish talk about our worthy friend, are you?"
Strange enough, the old man's countenance at once assumed a vague expression of disquietude, and whether he trusted the instinct and penetration of children, or whether he was influenced by another thought, far from making a jest of Madeleine's words, as his son did, he leaned over the child, and said: