here She stands to this day, does
She not appear strange? For She is not in Her true home under the
soaring white vault."

"Well, our friend, you are dreaming!"

Durtal started like a man roused from sleep.

"Ah! It is you, Madame Bavoil?"

"To be sure. I am going home from market, and from your lodgings."

"From my lodgings?"

"Yes, to invite you to breakfast. The Abbe Plomb's housekeeper is to be
out this afternoon, so he is coming to take his morning meal with us;
and the Father thought it would be a good opportunity to make you
acquainted."

"I am much obliged to him; but I must go home and tell Mother Mesurat,
that she may not cook my cutlet."

"You need not do that, as I have just come from her; not finding you, I
left word and told Madame Mesurat. Are you still satisfied with her?"

"Once upon a time," said he, laughing, "I had, to manage my house in
Paris, one Sieur Rateau, a drunkard of the first class, who turned
everything upside down, and led the furniture a life! Now I have this
worthy woman, who sets to work on a different system, but the results
are identically the same. She works by persuasion and gentle means; she
does not overthrow the furniture, or bellow as she turns the mattress,
or rush at the wall with a broom as if she were charging with fixed
bayonet; no, she quietly collects the dust and stirs it round and ends
by piling it in little heaps that she hides in the corners of the rooms;
she does not rummage the bed, but restricts herself to patting it with
the tip of her fingers, stroking the creases out of the sheets, puffing
up the pillows and coaxing them out of their hollows. The man turned
everything topsy-turvy; she moves nothing."

"Well, well; but she is a good woman!"

"Yes, and in spite of it all, I am glad to have her."

As they talked they had reached the entrance to the Bishop's residence.
They went through a little gate by the lodge into a large forecourt
strewn with small river pebbles, in front of a vast building of the
seventeenth century. There were no flowers of stone-work, no sculpture,
no decorative doorways--nothing but a frontage of shabby brick and
stone, a bare, uninviting structure evidently neglected, with tall
windows, behind which the shutters could be seen, painted grey. The
entrance was on the level of the first floor; double outside steps led
up to the door, and under the landing, in the arch below, there was a
glass door, through which, framed in the