n--" said the post master, dumbfounded.

"There now!" exclaimed Madame Massin, interrupting her cousin. "You are
going to say, just as Massin does, that a little girl of fifteen
can't invent such plans and carry them out, or make an old man of
eighty-three, who has never set foot in a church except to be married,
change his opinions,--now don't tell me he has such a horror of priests
that he wouldn't even go with the girl to the parish church when she
made her first communion. I'd like to know why, if Doctor Minoret hates
priests, he has spent nearly every evening for the last fifteen years of
his life with the Abbe Chaperon. The old hypocrite never fails to give
Ursula twenty francs for wax tapers every time she takes the sacrament.
Have you forgotten the gift Ursula made to the church in gratitude to
the cure for preparing her for her first communion? She spent all her
money on it, and her godfather returned it to her doubled. You men!
you don't pay attention to things. When I heard that, I said to myself,
'Farewell baskets, the vintage is done!' A rich uncle doesn't behave
that way to a little brat picked up in the streets without some good
reason."

"Pooh, cousin; I dare say the good man is only taking her to the door of
the church," replied the post master. "It is a fine day, and he is out
for a walk."

"I tell you he is holding a prayer-book, and looks sanctimonious--you'll
see him."

"They hide their game pretty well," said Minoret, "La Bougival told me
there was never any talk of religion between the doctor and the abbe.
Besides, the abbe is one of the most honest men on the face of the
globe; he'd give the shirt off his back to a poor man; he is incapable
of a base action, and to cheat a family out of their inheritance is--"

"Theft," said Madame Massin.

"Worse!" cried Minoret-Levrault, exasperated by the tongue of his
gossiping neighbour.

"Of course I know," said Madame Massin, "that the Abbe Chaperon is an
honest man; but he is capable of anything for the sake of his poor. He
must have mined and undermined uncle, and the old man has just tumbled
into piety. We did nothing, and here he is perverted! A man who never
believed in anything, and had principles of his own! Well! we're done
for. My husband is absolutely beside himself."

Madame Massin, whose sentences were so many arrows stinging her fat
cousin, made him walk as fast as herself, in spite of his obesity and
to the great astonishment of the