n, ascetic and serene, walking up and down
with great strides; two sisters of charity, buried under their caps,
counting long rosaries which measured their time of waiting; priests
from Lyons, recognisable by the shape of their hats; others reserved and
severe in air, sitting at the great ebony table which filled the middle
of the room, and turning over some of those pious journals printed at
Fouvieres, just above Lyons, the _Echo of Purgatory_, the _Rose-bush
of Mary_, which give as a present to all yearly subscribers pontifical
indulgences and remissions of future sins. Some muttered words, a
stifled cough, the light whispered prayers of the sisters, recalled to
Jansoulet the distant and confused sensation of the hours of waiting in
the corner of his village church round the confessional on the eves of
the great festivals of the Church.

At last his turn came, and if a doubt as to M. Le Merquier had remained,
he doubted no longer when he saw this great office, simple and severe,
yet a little more ornate than the waiting-room, a fitting frame for
the austerity of the lawyer's principles, and for his thin form, tall,
stooping, narrow-shouldered, squeezed into a black coat too short in
the sleeves, from which protruded two black fists, broad and flat,
two sticks of Indian ink with hieroglyphs of great veins. The clerical
deputy had, with the leaden hue of a Lyonnese grown mouldy between his
two rivers, a certain life of expression which he owed to his double
look--sometimes sparkling, but impenetrable behind the glass of his
spectacles; more often, vivid, mistrustful, and dark, above these same
glasses, surrounded by the shadow which a lifted eye and a stooping head
gives the eyebrow.

After a greeting almost cordial in comparison with the cold bow which
the two colleagues exchanged at the Chamber, an "I was expecting you" in
which perhaps an intention showed itself, the lawyer pointed the Nabob
into a seat near his desk, told the smug domestic in black not to come
till he was summoned, arranged a few papers, after which, sinking into
his arm-chair with the attitude of a man ready to listen, who becomes
all ears, his legs crossed, he rested his chin on his hand, with his
eyes fixed on a great rep curtain falling to the ground in front of him.

The moment was decisive, the situation embarrassing. Jansoulet did not
hesitate. It was one of the poor Nabob's pretensions to know men as
well as Mora. And this instinct, which,