His thin lips tightened, his narrow forehead seemed to grow narrower, and his very cassock appeared to contract austerely on his figure as he talked to the refugee of misfortune.
When the most pardonable of gossips, the Regimental Surgeon, asked him on his way home what he thought of Ferrol, he shrugged his shoulders, tightened his lips again, and said: "A polite, designing heretic." The Regimental Surgeon, though a Frenchman, had once belonged to a British battery of artillery stationed at Quebec, and there he had acquired an admiration for the English, which betrayed itself in his curious attempts to imitate Anglo-Saxon bluffness and blunt spontaneity.
When the Cure had gone, he flung back his shoulders, with a laugh, as he had seen the major-general do at the officers' mess at the citadel, and said in English: "Heretics are damn' funny.

I will go and call.

I have also some Irish whiskey.

He will like that; and pipes--pipes, plenty of them!" The pipe he was smoking at the moment had been given to him by the major-general, and he polished the silver ferrule, with its honourable inscription, every morning of his life.
On the morning of the second day after Ferrol came, he was carried off to the Manor Casimbault to see the painful alterations which were being made there under the direction of Madame Lavilette.

Sophie, who had a good deal of natural taste, had in the old days fought against her mother's incongruous ideas, and once, when the rehabilitation of the Manor Casimbault came up, she had made a protest; but it was unavailing, and it was her last effort.