“It is indeed they!” he cried.  “Do you see them, Monsieur le cure?  I see my boy; he is waving the handkerchief, and his mother is with him.  But I think there is a third person—­yes, there is a man, is there not?  Look well.”

“Indeed,” said the cure, “if my bad sight does not deceive me, I should say there was someone seated near the rudder; but it looks like a child.”

“Probably someone from the neighbourhood, who has profited by the chance of a lift home.”

The boat was advancing rapidly; they could now hear the cracking of the whip with which the servant urged on the tow-horse.  And now it stopped, at an easy landing-place, barely fifty paces from the terrace.  Madame de Lamotte landed with her son and the stranger, and her husband descended from the terrace to meet her.  Long before he arrived at the garden gate, his son’s arms were around his neck.

“Are you quite well, Edouard ?”

“Oh yes, perfectly.”

“And your mother?”

“Quite well too.  She is behind, in as great a hurry to meet you as I am.  But she can’t run as I do, and you must go half-way.”

“Whom have you brought with you?”

“A gentleman from Paris.”

“From Paris?”

“Yes, a Monsieur Derues.  But mamma will tell you all about that.  Here she is.”

The cure and the monk arrived just as Monsieur de Lamotte folded his wife in his arms.  Although she had passed her fortieth year, she was still beautiful enough to justify her husband’s eulogism.  A moderate plumpness had preserved the freshness and softness of her skin; her smile was charming, and her large blue eyes expressed both gentleness and goodness.  Seen beside this smiling and serene countenance, the appearance of the stranger was downright repulsive, and Monsieur de Lamotte could hardly repress a start of disagreeable surprise at the pitiful and sordid aspect of this diminutive person, who stood apart, looking overwhelmed by conscious inferiority.  He was still more astonished when he saw his son take him by the hand with friendly kindness, and heard him say—­

“Will you come with me, my friend?  We will follow my father and mother.”

Madame de Lamotte, having greeted the cure, looked at the monk, who was a stranger to her.  A word or two explained matters, and she took her husband’s arm, declining to answer any questions until she reached the louse, and laughing at his curiosity.

Pierre-Etienne de Saint-Faust de Lamotte, one of the king’s equerries, seigneur of Grange-Flandre, Valperfond, etc., had married Marie-Francoise Perier in 1760.  Their fortune resembled many others of that period:  it was more nominal than actual, more showy than solid.  Not that the husband and wife had any cause for self-reproach, or that their estates had suffered from dissipation; unstained by the corrupt manners of the period, their union had been a model of sincere affection, of domestic