ul of that great body called Minoret-Levrault and
led him about by his pug nose, she was made to feel the fears which
occasionally (we are told) assail all tamers of wild beasts. She
therefore made it a rule to get into a rage before he did; the
postilions knew very well when his wife had been quarreling with him,
for his anger ricocheted on them. Madame Minoret was as clever as she
was grasping; and it was a favorite remark in the whole town, "Where
would Minoret-Levrault be without his wife?"

"When you know what has happened," replied the post master, "you'll be
over the traces yourself."

"What is it?"

"Ursula has taken the doctor to mass."

Zelie's pupils dilated; she stood for a moment yellow with anger, then,
crying out, "I'll see it before I believe it!" she rushed into the
church. The service had reached the Elevation. The stillness of the
worshippers enabled her to look along each row of chairs and benches as
she went up the aisle beside the chapels to Ursula's place, where she
saw old Minoret standing with bared head.

If you recall the heads of Barbe-Marbois, Boissy d'Anglas, Morellet,
Helvetius, or Frederick the Great, you will see the exact image of
Doctor Minoret, whose green old age resembled that of those celebrated
personages. Their heads coined in the same mint (for each had the
characteristics of a medal) showed a stern and quasi-puritan profile,
cold tones, a mathematical brain, a certain narrowness about the
features, shrewd eyes, grave lips, and a something that was surely
aristocratic--less perhaps in sentiment than in habit, more in the ideas
than in the character. All men of this stamp have high brows retreating
at the summit, the sigh of a tendency to materialism. You will find
these leading characteristics of the head and these points of the face
in all the Encyclopedists, in the orators of the Gironde, in the men
of a period when religious ideas were almost dead, men who called
themselves deists and were atheists. The deist is an atheist lucky in
classification.

Minoret had a forehead of this description, furrowed with wrinkles,
which recovered in his old age a sort of artless candor from the manner
in which the silvery hair, brushed back like that of a woman when making
her toilet, curled in light flakes upon the blackness of his coat. He
persisted in dressing, as in his youth, in black silk stockings, shoes
with gold buckles, breeches of black poult-de-soie, and a black coat,
ado