, despite the fact that he had coarsened
as the years went on, had still upon him the touch of family tradition,
which may become either offensive pride or defensive self-respect.
With the Cure, Ferrol was not quite so successful. The ascetic, prudent
priest, with that instinctive, long-sighted accuracy which belongs
to the narrow-minded, scented difficulty. He disliked the English
exceedingly; and all Irishmen were English men to him. He resisted
Ferrol's blarney. His thin lips tightened, his narrow forehead seemed
to grow narrower, and his very cassock appeared to contract austerely on
his figure as he talked to the refugee of misfortune.

When the most pardonable of gossips, the Regimental Surgeon, asked him
on his way home what he thought of Ferrol, he shrugged his shoulders,
tightened his lips again, and said:

"A polite, designing heretic."

The Regimental Surgeon, though a Frenchman, had once belonged to a
British battery of artillery stationed at Quebec, and there he had
acquired an admiration for the English, which betrayed itself in his
curious attempts to imitate Anglo-Saxon bluffness and blunt spontaneity.
When the Cure had gone, he flung back his shoulders, with a laugh, as he
had seen the major-general do at the officers' mess at the citadel, and
said in English:

"Heretics are damn' funny. I will go and call. I have also some Irish
whiskey. He will like that; and pipes--pipes, plenty of them!"

The pipe he was smoking at the moment had been given to him by the
major-general, and he polished the silver ferrule, with its honourable
inscription, every morning of his life.

On the morning of the second day after Ferrol came, he was carried off
to the Manor Casimbault to see the painful alterations which were being
made there under the direction of Madame Lavilette. Sophie, who had
a good deal of natural taste, had in the old days fought against her
mother's incongruous ideas, and once, when the rehabilitation of the
Manor Casimbault came up, she had made a protest; but it was unavailing,
and it was her last effort. The Manor Casimbault was destined to be an
example of ancient dignity and modern bad taste. Alterations were going
on as Madame Lavilette, Ferrol and Christine entered.

For some time Ferrol watched the proceedings with a casual eye, but
presently he begged his hostess that she would leave the tall, old oak
clock where it was in the big hall, and that the new, platter-faced
office clock, in