ill!"

Mrs. Bread rose, with lowered eyes, and stood a moment; then, looking
up, she rested her eyes upon Newman's face. The disordered proprieties
were somehow settling to rest. She looked at Newman so long and so
fixedly, with such a dull, intense devotedness, that he himself might
have had a pretext for embarrassment. At last she said gently, "You are
not looking well, sir."

"That's natural enough," said Newman. "I have nothing to feel well
about. To be very indifferent and very fierce, very dull and very
jovial, very sick and very lively, all at once,--why, it rather mixes
one up."

Mrs. Bread gave a noiseless sigh. "I can tell you something that will
make you feel duller still, if you want to feel all one way. About
Madame de Cintre."

"What can you tell me?" Newman demanded. "Not that you have seen her?"

She shook her head. "No, indeed, sir, nor ever shall. That's the
dullness of it. Nor my lady. Nor M. de Bellegarde."

"You mean that she is kept so close."

"Close, close," said Mrs. Bread, very softly.

These words, for an instant, seemed to check the beating of Newman's
heart. He leaned back in his chair, staring up at the old woman. "They
have tried to see her, and she wouldn't--she couldn't?"

"She refused--forever! I had it from my lady's own maid," said Mrs.
Bread, "who had it from my lady. To speak of it to such a person my lady
must have felt the shock. Madame de Cintre won't see them now, and now
is her only chance. A while hence she will have no chance."

"You mean the other women--the mothers, the daughters, the sisters; what
is it they call them?--won't let her?"

"It is what they call the rule of the house,--or of the order, I
believe," said Mrs. Bread. "There is no rule so strict as that of the
Carmelites. The bad women in the reformatories are fine ladies to them.
They wear old brown cloaks--so the femme de chambre told me--that you
wouldn't use for a horse blanket. And the poor countess was so fond of
soft-feeling dresses; she would never have anything stiff! They sleep on
the ground," Mrs. Bread went on; "they are no better, no better,"--and
she hesitated for a comparison,--"they are no better than tinkers'
wives. They give up everything, down to the very name their poor old
nurses called them by. They give up father and mother, brother and
sister,--to say nothing of other persons," Mrs. Bread delicately added.
"They wear a shroud under their brown cloaks and a rope round their
wai