I have,” returned the latter. He drew out his watch and frowned. “They ought really to be here by now,” he observed.

“I doubt if it is quite dark enough outside,” replied his late adversary. “Le Blé-aux-Champs would hardly risk bringing M. de Kersaint into Hennebont while light remained.”

“I wish he had not gone to Scaër,” muttered the other.

“You do not think that anything has happened to M. le Marquis, do you, sir?” asked Roland de Céligny.

“No,” replied M. de Kersaint’s second-in-command. “I will not believe in misfortune; it is the way to bring it about.”

“Perhaps this is they,” suggested Artamène de la Vergne, the youth with his arm in a sling, as a step was heard on the echoing stairs. And even the silent reader lifted his head from his book to listen. 

But the moment of suspense which followed was not lightened when the door opened and old M. Charlot, the furniture-dealer, himself appeared on the threshold, candle in hand, tinted spectacles on nose. In a silence of expectancy he came in and shut the door carefully behind him, while five pairs of eyes stared at him uneasily.

“Gentlemen,” he began in a cautious voice, looking round on the forms ensconced among his shadowy furniture, “is not one of you a priest?”

The second piquet-player bent forward. “Yes, I am,” he surprisingly admitted. “Do you want me?”

“There is an old lady very ill next door, Monsieur l’Abbé, an old Mlle Magny, who has been a respected inhabitant of this town for many years. It is not that she wants a confessor or the Last Sacraments, because she had them two or three days ago; it is that to-night she is wandering so much that her niece, who looks after her, came in to me about it just now in great distress. The old lady seems to have something on her mind, and Mme Leclerc thought that if she could get a priest, an insermenté, of course——”

insermenté

The Abbé who looked so little of an Abbé interrupted. “I am quite ready to go to her, Monsieur Charlot, if it is necessary, but I should have thought that, rather than summon a stranger, the poor lady’s relatives would have had recourse to the priest who confessed her the other day.”

“Yes, mon père,” replied the old man, “but you see he lives very retired outside the town since Fructidor, and 

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