There were a few pictures on the whitewashed walls, and a few objects of art about the chamber, but in the main it had a comfortless air, which may in part have resulted from the fact that no fire had been lighted.
The great man tossed aside his pen, and rose as the door closed after the entering visitor.

Pushing his horn-rimmed spectacles up on to his forehead he stretched out his hand to La Boulaye.
"It is you, Caron," he murmured in that plaintive voice of his.

It was a voice that sorted well with the humane man who had resigned a judgeship at Arras sooner than pass a death-sentence, but hardly so well with him who, as Public Prosecutor in Paris, had brought some hundreds of heads to the sawdust.

"I have been desiring to congratulate you upon your victory of yesterday," he continued, "even as I have been congratulating myself upon the fact that it was I who found you and gave you to the Nation.

I feared that I might not see you ere I left." "You are leaving Paris ?" asked La Boulaye, without heeding the compliments in the earlier part of the other's speech.
"For a few days.