For Gemosac had been sacked and the furniture built up into a bonfire when Marie was a little child and the Abbe Touvent a fat-faced timorous boy at the Seminary of Saintes.
"Beyond is Mademoiselle's room," concluded Marie, curtly.

She looked round her and shrugged her shoulders with a grim laugh which made the Abbe shrink.

They looked at each other in silence, the two participants in the secret of Gemosac; for Marie's husband, the third who had access to the chateau, did not count.

He was a shambling, silent man, now working in the vineyard beneath the walls.

He always did what his wife told him, without comment or enthusiasm, knowing well that he would be blamed for doing it badly.
The Abbe had visited the rooms once before, during a brief passage of the Marquis, soon after his wife's death in Paris.