to the house.

He saw at once on passing the kitchen door that the first course had
been removed. When he reached the dining-room the old maid said, with a
tone of voice in which were mingled sour rebuke and joy at being able to
blame him:--

"It is half-past four, Monsieur Birotteau. You know we are not to wait
for you."

The vicar looked at the clock in the dining-room, and saw at once, by
the way the gauze which protected it from dust had been moved, that his
landlady had opened the face of the dial and set the hands in advance of
the clock of the cathedral. He could make no remark. Had he uttered
his suspicion it would only have caused and apparently justified one of
those fierce and eloquent expositions to which Mademoiselle Gamard, like
other women of her class, knew very well how to give vent in particular
cases. The thousand and one annoyances which a servant will sometimes
make her master bear, or a woman her husband, were instinctively divined
by Mademoiselle Gamard and used upon Birotteau. The way in which she
delighted in plotting against the poor vicar's domestic comfort bore all
the marks of what we must call a profoundly malignant genius. Yet she so
managed that she was never, so far as eye could see, in the wrong.

III

Eight days after the date on which this history began, the new
arrangements of the household and the relations which grew up between
the Abbe Birotteau and Mademoiselle Gamard revealed to the former the
existence of a plot which had been hatching for the last six months.

As long as the old maid exercised her vengeance in an underhand way, and
the vicar was able to shut his eyes to it and refuse to believe in her
malevolent intentions, the moral effect upon him was slight. But since
the affair of the candlestick and the altered clock, Birotteau would
doubt no longer that he was under an eye of hatred turned fully upon
him. From that moment he fell into despair, seeing everywhere the
skinny, clawlike fingers of Mademoiselle Gamard ready to hook into his
heart. The old maid, happy in a sentiment as fruitful of emotions as
that of vengeance, enjoyed circling and swooping above the vicar as a
bird of prey hovers and swoops above a field-mouse before pouncing down
upon it and devouring it. She had long since laid a plan which the poor
dumbfounded priest was quite incapable of imagining, and which she now
proceeded to unfold with that genius for little things often shown by
solitar