k
cloth. The costumes of the Roman soldiers, he insisted, must
be copied from those on Trajan's Column.

His words opened superb vistas before the old priest's eyes;
he was enchanted, ravished, yet full of doubts and fears. Alas!
Monsieur Schuver was quite helpless if it came to designing anything
more ambitious than his paper roses. Then Jean must needs take
a look round in the shed where the properties were stored, and
the two discussed together how the stage must be set and the
side-scenes worked. Jean took measurements, drew up a plan, worked
out an estimate. He manifested a passionate eagerness that was
surprising, albeit the old priest took it all as a matter of
course. A batten would come here, a practicable door there. The
actor would enter there...

But the worthy priest checked him:

"Say the reciter, my dear boy; _actor_ is not a word for
self-respecting people."

Barring this trifling misunderstanding, they were in perfect
accord. The sun was setting by this time and the Abbe Bordier's
shadow, grotesquely elongated, danced up and down the sandy floor
of the shed, while the old, broken voice declaimed tags of verse
that echoed to the furthest recesses of the court. But Jean Servien
was smiling at the vision only _his_ eyes could see of Gabrielle,
the inspirer of all his enthusiasm.

XXI

It was nearly the end of the long evening preparation and absolute
quiet reigned in the schoolroom. The broad lamp-shades concentrated
the light on the tangled heads of the boys, who were working at
their lessons or sitting in a brown study with their noses on
the desks. The only sounds were the crackling of paper, the lads'
breathing and the scratch, scratch of steel pens. The youngest
there, his cheeks still browned by the sea-breezes, was dreaming
over his half-finished exercise of a beach on the Normandy coast
and the sand-castles he and his friends used to build, to see
them swept away presently by the waves of the rising tide.

At the top of the great room, at the high desk where the
Superintendent of Studies had solemnly installed him underneath
the great ebony crucifix, Jean Servien, his head between his
two hands, was reading a Latin poet.

He felt utterly sad and lonely; but he had not realized yet that
his new life was an actual fact, and from moment to moment he
expected the schoolroom would suddenly vanish and the desks with
their litter of dictionaries and grammars and the young heads
gilded