I was beautiful." "Was ?" echoed the Abbe, reproachfully.
"Silence, wicked one! And you a priest." "Even an ecclesiastic, Madame, may have eyes," he said, darkly, as he snuffed a candle and, subsequently, gave himself a mechanical thump on the chest, in the region of the heart.
"Then they should wear blinkers, like a horse," said Madame, severely, as if wearied by an admiration so universal that it palled.
At this moment, Albert de Chantonnay entered the room.

He was enveloped in a long black cloak, which he threw off his shoulders and cast over the back of a chair, not without an obvious appreciation of its possibilities of the picturesque.

He looked round the room with a mild eye, which refused to lend itself to mystery or a martial ruthlessness.
He was a young man with a very thin neck, and the whiskers, of which his mother made complaint, were scarcely visible by the light of the Abbe's candles.
"Good!" he said, in a thin tenor voice.

"We are in time." He came forward to the table, with long, nervous strides.

He was not exactly impressive, but his manner gave the assurance of a distinct earnestness of purpose.