“Heaven forbid!—and I a widow!” replied Madame de Chantonnay, arranging, with a stout hand, the priceless lace on her dress. “Albert is coming. We brought a lantern, although it is a moon. It is better. Besides, it is always done by those who conspire. And Albert had his great cloak, and he fell up a step in the courtyard and dropped the lantern, and lost it in the long grass. I left him looking for it, in the dark. He was not afraid, my brave Albert!”
“He has the dauntless heart of his mother,” murmured the Abbé, gracefully, as he ran round the table setting the chairs in order. He had already offered the largest and strongest to the Comtesse, and it was creaking under her now, as she moved to set her dress in order.
“Assuredly,” she admitted, complacently. “Has not France produced a Jeanne d’Arc and a Duchesse de Berri? It was not from his father, at all events, that he inherited his courage. For he was a poltroon, that man. Yes, my dear Abbé, let us be honest, and look at life as it is. He was a poltroon, and I thought I loved him—for two or three days only, however. And I was a child then. I was beautiful.”
“Was?” echoed the Abbé, 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 Abbé’s candles.
“Good!” he said, in a thin tenor voice. “We are in time.”