by the lamp-light melt into thin air.

Suddenly a paper pellet, shot from the far end of the hall, struck
him on the cheek. He turned pale and cried in a voice shaking
with anger:

"Monsieur de Grizolles, leave the room!"

There was some whispering and stifled laughter, then peace was
restored. The scratching of pens began again, and exercises were
passed surreptitiously from hand to hand for cribbing purposes.

He was an usher.

His father had come to this decision by the advice of Monsieur
Marguerite, the _vicaire_ of his parish and a friend of the Abbe
Bordier. The bookbinder, having a high respect for knowledge,
entertained a correspondingly high idea of the status of all its
ministers. Assistant master struck him as an imposing title, and
he was delighted to have his son connected with an aristocratic
and religious foundation.

"Your son," the Abbe Marguerite told him, "will read for his
Master's degree in the intervals of his duties, and the title
of Licencie-es-Lettres will open the door to the higher walks
of teaching. We have known assistants rise to high positions
in the University and even occupy Monsieur de Fontanes' chair."

These considerations had clenched the bookbinder's resolution,
and this was now the third day of Jean's ushership.

XXII

Three months had dragged by. It was a Friday; a hot, nauseating
smell of fried fish filled the refectory; a strong drought blew
cold about feet encased in wet boots; the walls dripped with
moisture, and outside the barred windows a fine rain was falling
from a grey sky. The boys, seated at marble-topped tables, were
making a hideous rattle with their forks and tin cups, while
one of their schoolfellows, seated at the desk in the middle of
the great room, was reading aloud, as the regulations direct,
a passage from Rollin's _Ancient History_.

Jean, at the head of a table, his nose in his ill-washed earthenware
plate, had cold feet and a sore heart. Something resembling rotten
wood formed a deposit at the bottom of his glass, while the servers
were handing round dishes of prunes with their thumbs washing in
the juice. Now and again, amid the rattle of plates, the rasping
voice of the reader, a lad of seventeen, reached the usher's ears.
He caught the name of Cleopatra and some scraps of sentences:
"_She was about to appear before Antony at an age when women
unite with the flower of their beauty every charm of wit and
intellect... her person more c