“Yonder carriage,” said Jahel, “stopped at the same moment as ours. That means that we are followed. I am curious to discover the features of the people travelling in that vehicle. I feel very uneasy about it. Does not one of the travellers wear a very narrow and high headgear? The carriage very much resembles the one in which my uncle brought me, when a child, to Paris after he had killed the Portuguese. It remained, I believe, in one of the coach-houses at the Castle of Sablons. It really seems to be the same, of horrible memory, because I remember my uncle in it, fuming with rage. You cannot conceive, Jacques, how violent his hate is. I myself had to bear his rage the day I came away. He locked me in my room and vomited the most horrible curses on the Abbé Coignard. I shiver when I think what his rage must have been when he found my room empty and the sheets still attached to the window by which I left to fly with you.”
“You ought to say with M. d’Anquetil.”
“How punctilious you are! Did we not depart together? Yonder carriage torments me, it is so much like my uncle’s.”
“Be sure, Jahel, that it’s the carriage of some honest Burgundian, who goes about his business and does not think of us.”
“You don’t know,” said Jahel. “I’m afraid.”
“You cannot fear, however, that your uncle could run after you in his state of decrepitude. He does not occupy himself with anything but cabala and Hebraic dreams.”
“You don’t know him,” she replied, and sighed. “He is occupied with naught but myself. He loves me as much as he hates the rest of the universe. He loves me in a manner—
“In a manner?”
“—In all the manners—in short he loves me.”
“Jahel, I shudder to hear you. Good heavens: that Mosaide loves you without that disinterestedness which is so admirable in an old man, and so well suited for an uncle? Tell me all, Jahel-all!”