bourine had collected.

"I know not," replied one of his neighbors, "I think that she has gone
to make some of her fandangoes in the house opposite, whither they have
called her."

In the place of the gypsy, on the carpet, whose arabesques had seemed to
vanish but a moment previously by the capricious figures of her dance,
the archdeacon no longer beheld any one but the red and yellow man,
who, in order to earn a few testers in his turn, was walking round the
circle, with his elbows on his hips, his head thrown back, his face red,
his neck outstretched, with a chair between his teeth. To the chair he
had fastened a cat, which a neighbor had lent, and which was spitting in
great affright.

"Notre-Dame!" exclaimed the archdeacon, at the moment when the juggler,
perspiring heavily, passed in front of him with his pyramid of chair and
his cat, "What is Master Pierre Gringoire doing here?"

The harsh voice of the archdeacon threw the poor fellow into such a
commotion that he lost his equilibrium, together with his whole edifice,
and the chair and the cat tumbled pell-mell upon the heads of the
spectators, in the midst of inextinguishable hootings.

It is probable that Master Pierre Gringoire (for it was indeed he) would
have had a sorry account to settle with the neighbor who owned the cat,
and all the bruised and scratched faces which surrounded him, if he
had not hastened to profit by the tumult to take refuge in the church,
whither Claude Frollo had made him a sign to follow him.

The cathedral was already dark and deserted; the side-aisles were full
of shadows, and the lamps of the chapels began to shine out like stars,
so black had the vaulted ceiling become. Only the great rose window of
the facade, whose thousand colors were steeped in a ray of horizontal
sunlight, glittered in the gloom like a mass of diamonds, and threw its
dazzling reflection to the other end of the nave.

When they had advanced a few paces, Dom Claude placed his back against a
pillar, and gazed intently at Gringoire. The gaze was not the one which
Gringoire feared, ashamed as he was of having been caught by a grave and
learned person in the costume of a buffoon. There was nothing mocking or
ironical in the priest's glance, it was serious, tranquil, piercing. The
archdeacon was the first to break the silence.

"Come now, Master Pierre. You are to explain many things to me. And
first of all, how comes it that you have not been seen for two m