Thus enjoined, Papa Patoux kissed his children affectionately, signing the cross on their brows as they came up to him in turn, after the fashion of his own father, who had continued this custom up to his dying day.  What they thought of the benediction in itself might be somewhat difficult to define, but it can be safely asserted that a passion of tears on the part of Babette, and a fit of demoniacal howling from Henri, would have been the inevitable result if Papa Patoux had refused to bestow it on them.  Whether there were virtue in it or not, their father’s mute blessing sent them to bed peaceably and in good humour with each other, and they trotted off very contentedly beside their mother, hushing their footsteps and lowering their voices as they passed the door of the room occupied by Cardinal Bonpre.

“The Archbishop is not an angel, is he?” asked Babette whisperingly.

Her mother smiled broadly.

“Not exactly, my little one.  Why such a foolish question?”

“You said that Cardinal Bonpre was a saint, and that perhaps we should see an angel come down from heaven to visit him,” replied Babette.

“Well, you could not have thought the Archbishop came from heaven,” interpolated Henri, scornfully,—­“He came from his own house over the way with his own secretary behind him.  Do angels keep secretaries?”

Babette laughed aloud,—­the idea was grotesque.  The two children were just then ascending the wooden stairs to their bedroom, the mother carrying a lighted candle behind them, and at that moment the rich sonorous voice of the Archbishop, raised to a high and somewhat indignant tone, reached them with these words—­“I consider that you altogether mistake your calling and position.”

Then the voice died away into inaudible murmurings.

“They are quarrelling!  The Archbishop is angry!” said Henri with a grin.

“Perhaps Archbishops do not like saints,” suggested Babette.

“Tais-toi!  Cardinal Bonpre is an archbishop himself, little silly,” said Madame Patoux—­“Therefore those great and distinguished Monseigneurs are like brothers.”

“That is why they are quarrelling!” declared Henri glibly,—­“A boy told me in school that Cain and Abel were the first pair of brothers, and they quarrelled,—­and all brothers have quarrelled ever since.  It’s in the blood, so that boy says,—­and it is his excuse always for fighting his little brother.  His little brother is six, and he is twelve;—­and of course he always knocks his little brother down.  He cannot help it, he says.  And he gets books on physiology and heredity, and he learns in them that whatever is in the blood has got to come out somehow.  He says that it’s because Cain killed Abel that there are wars between nations;—­if Cain and Abel had never quarrelled, there would never have been any fighting in the world,—­and now that it’s in the blood of every body—­”