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“Madame,” the servant replied, “Monsieur is very sick. You let him eat too much.”

“What could I do?” Madame Marmus replied. “He was at one end of the table and I at the other. He returned without me, as his habit is! Poor little man! I will go to him as soon as I change my dress.”

Madame Adolphe returns to the pavilion to propose an emetic, and scolds the professor for not having returned with Madame Marmus.

“Since you wished to come in a cab, you might have spared me the expense of the one that Madame Marmus took. The charge for your cab was an hour. Did you stop anywhere?”

“At the Institute,” he replied.

“At the Institute! Where did you take the cab?” she asked.

“In front of a bridge, I think,” he replied.

“Was it still daylight?” she asked.

“Almost,” he said.

“Then you did not go to Madame Vernet’s!” exclaimed Madame Adolphe.

“Why did you not come to Madame Vernet’s?” asked his wife.

Madame Marmus, having come to the door on the tips of her toes, had heard Madame Adolphe’s exclamation. She did not wish to see Madame Adolphe’s astonishment. Surely Madame Adolphe could not have forgotten the assurance with which the professor’s wife had placed him in imagination at Madame Vernet’s table.

“My dear child, I do not know,” said the professor in a repentant tone.

“Then you have not dined,” said Madame Marmus, whose attitude remained that of the purest innocence.

“With what could he have dined, Madame? He had two sous,” said Madame Adolphe, looking at Madame Marmus with an accusing air.

“Ah, I am truly to be pitied, my poor Madame Adolphe,” said Madame Marmus. “This sort of thing has been going on for twenty years, and I am not yet accustomed to it. Six days after our wedding, we were going out of our room one morning to take breakfast. M. Marmus hears the drum of the Polytechnic School pupils of whom he was the professor. He quits me to go and see them pass. I was nineteen years of age and when I pouted, you cannot guess what he said to me. He said, ‘These young people are the flower and the glory of France!’ This is how my marriage began. You can judge of the rest.”

“Oh, Monsieur, is it possible?” asked Madame Adolphe with an indignant air.

“I have cornered Sinard!” exclaimed M. Marmus triumphantly.

“Oh, he would let himself die!” exclaimed Madame Adolphe.

“Get something for him to eat,” said Madame Marmus. “He would let himself do anything. Ah, my good Madame Adolphe, a man of science, you see, is a man who knows nothing–of life.”

The malady was cured by a cataplasm of Italian cheese that the man of science ate without knowing what he was eating, for he held Sinard in a corner–

“Poor Madame,” said the kind Madame Adolphe. “I pity you. He was really so absent-minded as that!”

And Madame Adolphe forgot the strange avowal of her mistress.