er made another pleasing variety on the monologues of the oracle.
The three rivals, tired of keeping their minds up to the level of the
"high range of discussion"--as they called their conversation--but not
daring to confess it, would sometimes turn with ingratiating hints to
the old priest.

"Monsieur le Cure is dying for his game," they would say.

The wily priest lent himself very readily to the little trick. He
protested.

"We should lose too much by ceasing to listen to our inspired hostess!"
and so he would incite Dinah's magnanimity to take pity at last on her
dear Abbe.

This bold manoeuvre, a device of the Sous-prefet's, was repeated with
so much skill that Dinah never suspected her slaves of escaping to the
prison yard, so to speak, of the cardtable; and they would leave her one
of the younger functionaries to harry.

One young landowner, and the dandy of Sancerre, fell away from Dinah's
good graces in consequence of some rash demonstrations. After soliciting
the honor of admission to this little circle, where he flattered himself
he could snatch the blossom from the constituted authorities who guarded
it, he was so unfortunate as to yawn in the middle of an explanation
Dinah was favoring him with--for the fourth time, it is true--of the
philosophy of Kant. Monsieur de la Thaumassiere, the grandson of the
historian of Le Berry, was thenceforth regarded as a man entirely bereft
of soul and brains.

The three devotees _en titre_ each submitted to these exorbitant demands
on their mind and attention, in hope of a crowning triumph, when at last
Dinah should become human; for neither of them was so bold as to imagine
that Dinah would give up her innocence as a wife till she should have
lost all her illusions. In 1826, when she was surrounded by adorers,
Dinah completed her twentieth year, and the Abbe Duret kept her in
a sort of fervid Catholicism; so her worshipers had to be content to
overwhelm her with little attentions and small services, only too happy
to be taken for the carpet-knights of this sovereign lady, by strangers
admitted to spend an evening or two at La Baudraye.

"Madame de la Baudraye is a fruit that must be left to ripen." This was
the opinion of Monsieur Gravier, who was waiting.

As to the lawyer, he wrote letters four pages long, to which Dinah
replied in soothing speech as she walked, leaning on his arm, round and
round the lawn after dinner.

Madame de la Baudraye, thus guarded by