it seemed to him that he had
grown a century older. All at once he heard the creaking of the boards
of the stairway; some one was ascending. The trapdoor opened once more;
a light reappeared. There was a tolerably large crack in the worm-eaten
door of his den; he put his face to it. In this manner he could see
all that went on in the adjoining room. The cat-faced old crone was the
first to emerge from the trap-door, lamp in hand; then Phoebus, twirling
his moustache, then a third person, that beautiful and graceful figure,
la Esmeralda. The priest beheld her rise from below like a dazzling
apparition. Claude trembled, a cloud spread over his eyes, his pulses
beat violently, everything rustled and whirled around him; he no longer
saw nor heard anything.

When he recovered himself, Phoebus and Esmeralda were alone seated on
the wooden coffer beside the lamp which made these two youthful figures
and a miserable pallet at the end of the attic stand out plainly before
the archdeacon's eyes.

Beside the pallet was a window, whose panes broken like a spider's web
upon which rain has fallen, allowed a view, through its rent meshes, of
a corner of the sky, and the moon lying far away on an eiderdown bed of
soft clouds.

The young girl was blushing, confused, palpitating. Her long, drooping
lashes shaded her crimson cheeks. The officer, to whom she dared
not lift her eyes, was radiant. Mechanically, and with a charmingly
unconscious gesture, she traced with the tip of her finger incoherent
lines on the bench, and watched her finger. Her foot was not visible.
The little goat was nestling upon it.

The captain was very gallantly clad; he had tufts of embroidery at his
neck and wrists; a great elegance at that day.

It was not without difficulty that Dom Claude managed to hear what they
were saying, through the humming of the blood, which was boiling in his
temples.

(A conversation between lovers is a very commonplace affair. It is a
perpetual "I love you." A musical phrase which is very insipid and very
bald for indifferent listeners, when it is not ornamented with some
_fioriture_; but Claude was not an indifferent listener.)

"Oh!" said the young girl, without raising her eyes, "do not despise me,
monseigneur Phoebus. I feel that what I am doing is not right."

"Despise you, my pretty child!" replied the officer with an air of
superior and distinguished gallantry, "despise you, _tete-Dieu_! and
why?"

"For having fo