“Have you seen the ’Ducler’?” asked Minoret.

“Monsieur Desire?” said the postilion, interrupting his master.  “Hey! you must have heard us, didn’t our whips tell you? we felt you were somewhere along the road.”

Just then a woman dressed in her Sunday clothes,—­for the bells were pealing from the clock tower and calling the inhabitants to mass,—­a woman about thirty-six years of age came up to the post master.

“Well, cousin,” she said, “you wouldn’t believe me—­ Uncle is with Ursula in the Grand’Rue, and they are going to mass.”

In spite of the modern poetic canons as to local color, it is quite impossible to push realism so far as to repeat the horrible blasphemy mingled with oaths which this news, apparently so unexciting, brought from the huge mouth of Minoret-Levrault; his shrill voice grew sibilant, and his face took on the appearance of what people oddly enough call a sunstroke.

“Is that true?” he asked, after the first explosion of his wrath was over.

The postilions bowed to their master as they and their horses passed him, but he seemed to neither see nor hear them.  Instead of waiting for his son, Minoret-Levrault hurried up to the Grand’Rue with his cousin.

“Didn’t I always tell you so?” she resumed.  “When Doctor Minoret goes out of his head that demure little hypocrite will drag him into religion; whoever lays hold of the mind gets hold of the purse, and she’ll have our inheritance.”

“But, Madame Massin—­” said the post master, dumbfounded.

“There now!” exclaimed Madame Massin, interrupting her cousin.  “You are going to say, just as Massin does, that a little girl of fifteen can’t invent such plans and carry them out, or make an old man of eighty-three, who has never set foot in a church except to be married, change his opinions,—­now don’t tell me he has such a horror of priests that he wouldn’t even go with the girl to the parish church when she made her first communion.  I’d like to know why, if Doctor Minoret hates priests, he has spent nearly every evening for the last fifteen years of his life with the Abbe Chaperon.  The old hypocrite never fails to give Ursula twenty francs for wax tapers every time she takes the sacrament.  Have you forgotten the gift Ursula made to the church in gratitude to the cure for preparing her for her first communion?  She spent all her money on it, and her godfather returned it to her doubled.  You men! you don’t pay attention to things.  When I heard that, I said to myself, ‘Farewell baskets, the vintage is done!’ A rich uncle doesn’t behave that way to a little brat picked up in the streets without some good reason.”

“Pooh, cousin; I dare say the good man is only taking her to the door of the church,” replied the post master.  “It is a fine day, and he is out for a walk.”

“I tell you he is holding a prayer-book, and looks sanctimonious —­you’ll see him.”

“They hide their game pretty well,” said Minoret, “La Bougival told me there was never any talk of religion between the doctor and the abbe.  Besides, the abbe is one of the most honest men on the face of the globe; he’d give the shirt off his back to a poor man; he is incapable of a base action, and to cheat a family out of their inheritance is—­”