Nicolas twice looked back, and twice encountered Blondet's gaze.

The journalist continued to watch the tall scoundrel, who was broad in the shoulders, healthy and vigorous in complexion, with black hair curling tightly, and whose rather soft face showed upon its lips and around the mouth certain lines which reveal the peculiar cruelty that characterizes sluggards and voluptuaries.

Catherine swung her petticoat, striped blue and white, with an air of insolent coquetry.
"Cain and his wife!" said Blondet to the abbe.
"You are nearer the truth than you know," replied the priest.
"Ah! Monsieur le cure, what will they do to me ?" said La Pechina, when the brother and sister were out of sight.
The countess, as white as her handkerchief, was so overcome that she heard neither Blondet nor the abbe nor La Pechina.
"It is enough to drive one from this terrestrial paradise," she said at last.

"But the first thing of all is to save that child from their claws." "You are right," said Blondet in a low voice.

"That child is a poem, a living poem." Just then the Montenegrin girl was in a state where soul and body smoke, as it were, after the conflagration of an anger which has driven all forces, physical and intellectual, to their utmost tension.