“What is it?”
“They fetched a priest—”
“But send for a doctor, bless me!” cried Mademoiselle de Bellefeuille. “Francoise, a doctor! How is it that these ladies never sent for a doctor?”
“They sent for a priest——” repeated the old woman with a gasp.
“She is so ill—and no soothing draught, nothing on her table!”
The mother made a vague sign, which Caroline’s watchful eye understood, for she was silent to let her mother speak.
“They brought a priest—to hear my confession, as they said.—Beware, Caroline!” cried the old woman with an effort, “the priest made me tell him your benefactor’s name.”
“But who can have told you, poor mother?”
The old woman died, trying to look knowingly cunning. If Mademoiselle de Bellefeuille had noted her mother’s face she might have seen what no one ever will see—Death laughing.
To enter into the interests that lay beneath this introduction to my tale, we must for a moment forget the actors in it, and look back at certain previous incidents, of which the last was closely concerned with the death of Madame Crochard. The two parts will then form a whole—a story which, by a law peculiar to life in Paris, was made up of two distinct sets of actions.