reet is one of
its veins; the town has no other breath than its own. On that account,
this spirit of another age, this religious torpor from the past, makes
the cloistered city which surrounds it redolent with a savoury perfume
of peace and of faith.

And in all this mystic place, the house of the Huberts, where Angelique
was to live in the future, was the one nearest to the Cathedral,
and which clung to it as if in reality it were a part thereof. The
permission to build there, between two of the great buttresses, must
have been given by some vicar long ago, who was desirous of attaching
to himself the ancestors of this line of embroiderers, as master
chasuble-makers and furnishers for the Cathedral clergy. On the southern
side, the narrow garden was barred by the colossal building; first,
the circumference of the side chapels, whose windows overlooked the
flower-beds, and then the slender, long nave, that the flying buttresses
supported, and afterwards the high roof covered with the sheet lead.

The sun never penetrated to the lower part of this garden, where ivy and
box alone grew luxuriantly; yet the eternal shadow there was very soft
and pleasant as it fell from the gigantic brow of the apse--a religious
shadow, sepulchral and pure, which had a good odour about it. In the
greenish half-light of its calm freshness, the two towers let fall
only the sound of their chimes. But the entire house kept the quivering
therefrom, sealed as it was to these old stones, melted into them and
supported by them. It trembled at the least of the ceremonies; at the
High Mass, the rumbling of the organ, the voices of the choristers, even
the oppressed sighs of the worshippers, murmured through each one of
its rooms, lulled it as if with a holy breath from the Invisible, and
at times through the half-cool walls seemed to come the vapours from the
burning incense.

For five years Angelique lived and grew there, as if in a cloister, far
away from the world. She only went out to attend the seven-o'clock Mass
on Sunday mornings, as Hubertine had obtained permission for her to
study at home, fearing that, if sent to school, she might not always
have the best of associates. This old dwelling, so shut in, with its
garden of a dead quiet, was her world. She occupied as her chamber a
little whitewashed room under the roof; she went down in the morning to
her breakfast in the kitchen, she went up again to the working-room in
the second story to