"A nice father you are," cried his brother Jacques.

"The idea of trusting Léon with a baby. Why, he will pitch it overboard
if it cries," said little Louis, a remark which so annoyed the baron
that he promptly seized Louis by the collar and turned him out of the
room.

"You really must have been mad, Arnaud, to dream of such a thing as
entrusting Léon, of all people in the world, with an infant," said the
old baroness, for once taking the part of her daughter-in-law against
her son.

Père Yvon said nothing just then; it would not have been wise to have
done so while the baron's temper was ruffled by the criticisms of his
family or in their presence, but when he was alone with Arnaud, Père
Yvon spoke his mind pretty freely, and read the baron a severer lecture
than he had ever done all the years he was under his tuition.

It was nothing but jealousy which had prompted such a mad, cruel act,
and jealousy of the most unreasonable--he might almost say
unpardonable--kind: a father to be jealous of his wife's love for his
own child! There was a German saying, excellent in the original, but
which lost the double play upon the words in the translation which Père
Yvon quoted to the baron--

"Die Eifersucht ist eine Leidenschaft,
Der mit Eifer sucht muss Leiden schaffen,"

which means, freely translated, that jealousy is a passion which brings