Patoux considered the matter solemnly.

“He is perhaps very poor?” he half queried.

“Poor, he may be,” responded Madame,—­“But if he is, it is surely his own fault,—­whoever heard of a poor Cardinal-Archbishop!  Such men can all be rich if they choose.”

“Can they?” asked Henri with sudden vivacious eagerness.  “How?”

But his question was not answered, for just at that moment a loud knock came at the door of the inn, and a tall broadly built personage in close canonical attire appeared in the narrow little passage of entry, attended by another smaller and very much more insignificant-looking individual.

Patoux hastily scrambled out of his chair.

“The Archbishop!” he whispered to his wife—­“He himself!  Our own Archbishop!”

Madame Patoux jumped up, and seizing her children, held one in each hand as she curtsied up and down.

Benedicite!” said the new-comer, lightly signing the cross in air with a sociable smile—­“Do not disturb yourselves, my children!  You have with you in this house the eminent Cardinal Bonpre?”

“Ah, yes, Monseigneur!” replied Madame Patoux—­“Only just now he has finished his little supper.  Shall I show Monseigneur to his room?”

“If you please,” returned the Archbishop, still smiling benevolently—­“And permit my secretary to wait with you here till I return.”

With this, and an introductory wave of his hand in the direction of the attenuated and sallow-faced personage who had accompanied him, he graciously permitted Madame Patoux to humbly precede him by a few steps, and then followed her with a soft, even tread, and a sound as of rustling silk in his garments, from which a faint odour of some delicate perfume seemed wafted as he moved.

Left to entertain the Archbishop’s secretary, Jean Patoux was for a minute or two somewhat embarrassed.  Henri and Babette stared at the stranger with undisguised curiosity, and were apparently not favourably impressed by his appearance.

“He has white eyelashes!” whispered Henri.

“And yellow teeth,” responded Babette.

Meanwhile Patoux, having scratched his bullet-head sufficiently over the matter, offered his visitor a chair.

“Sit down, sir,” he said curtly.

The secretary smiled pallidly and took the proffered accommodation.  Patoux again meditated.  He was not skilled in the art of polite conversation, and he found himself singularly at a loss.

“It would be an objection no doubt, and an irreverance perhaps to smoke a pipe before you, Monsieur—­Monsieur—­”

“Cazeau,” finished the secretary with another pallid smile—­“Claude Cazeau, a poor scribe,—­at your service!  And I beg of you, Monsieur Jean Patoux, to smoke at your distinguished convenience!”

There was a faint tone of satire in his voice which struck Papa Patoux as exceedingly disagreeable, though he could not quite imagine why he found it so.  He slowly reached for his pipe from the projecting shelf above the chimney, and as slowly proceeded to fill it with tobacco from a tin cannister close by.