“Where is it?”

“To your left.”

Philippe Goulenoire put the letter through the slit of an iron box above which was a loophole.

“The devil!” thought he, “plainly the king comes here, as they say he does; he couldn’t take more precautions at Plessis.”

He waited for more than a quarter of an hour in the street.  After that lapse of time, he heard Cornelius saying to his sister, “Close the traps of the door.”

A clinking of chains resounded from within.  Philippe heard the bolts run, the locks creak, and presently a small low door, iron-bound, opened to the slightest distance through which a man could pass.  At the risk of tearing off his clothing, Philippe squeezed himself rather than walked into La Malemaison.  A toothless old woman with a hatchet face, the eyebrows projecting like the handles of a cauldron, the nose and chin so near together that a nut could scarcely pass between them, —­a pallid, haggard creature, her hollow temples composed apparently of only bones and nerves,—­guided the “soi-disant” foreigner silently into a lower room, while Cornelius followed prudently behind him.

“Sit there,” she said to Philippe, showing him a three-legged stool placed at the corner of a carved stone fireplace, where there was no fire.

On the other side of the chimney-piece was a walnut table with twisted legs, on which was an egg in a plate and ten or a dozen little bread-sops, hard and dry and cut with studied parsimony.  Two stools placed beside the table, on one of which the old woman sat down, showed that the miserly pair were eating their suppers.  Cornelius went to the door and pushed two iron shutters into their place, closing, no doubt, the loopholes through which they had been gazing into the street; then he returned to his seat.  Philippe Goulenoire (so called) next beheld the brother and sister dipping their sops into the egg in turn, and with the utmost gravity and the same precision with which soldiers dip their spoons in regular rotation into the mess-pot.  This performance was done in silence.  But as he ate, Cornelius examined the false apprentice with as much care and scrutiny as if he were weighing an old coin.

Philippe, feeling that an icy mantle had descended on his shoulders, was tempted to look about him; but, with the circumspection dictated by all amorous enterprises, he was careful not to glance, even furtively, at the walls; for he fully understood that if Cornelius detected him, he would not allow so inquisitive a person to remain in his house.  He contented himself, therefore, by looking first at the egg and then at the old woman, occasionally contemplating his future master.