enais and was sixteen.

Brotteaux offered to see her safe to anywhere she wished to go. She did
not know a soul in Paris; but she had an aunt, in service at Palaiseau,
who would take her in.

Brotteaux made up his mind at once.

"Come with me, my child," he ordered, and led the way home, with her
hanging on his arm.

On his arrival, he found the Pere Longuemare in the garret reading his
breviary.

Holding Athenais by the hand, he drew the other's attention to her:

"Father," he said, "here is a girl from the Rue Fromenteau who has been
shouting: 'Vive le roi!' The revolutionary police are on her track. She
has nowhere to lay head. Will you allow the girl to pass the night
here?"

The Pere Longuemare closed his breviary.

"If I understand you right," he said, "you ask me, sir, if this young
girl, who is like myself subject to be molested under a warrant of
arrest, may be suffered, for her temporal salvation, to spend the night
in the same room as I?"

"Yes, Father."

"By what right should I object? and why must I suppose myself affronted
by her presence? am I so sure that I am any better than she?"

He established himself for the night in an old broken-down armchair,
declaring he should sleep excellently in it. Athenais lay on the
mattress. Brotteaux stretched himself on the palliasse and blew out the
candle.

The hours and half-hours sounded one after the other from the church
towers, but the old man could not sleep; he lay awake listening to the
mingled breathing of the man of religion and the girl of pleasure. The
moon rose, symbol and witness of his old-time loves, and threw a silvery
ray into the attic, illuminating the fair hair and golden lashes, the
delicate nose and round, red mouth of Athenais, who lay sound asleep.

"Truly," he thought to himself, "a terrible enemy for the Republic!"

When Athenais awoke, the day was breaking. The Monk had disappeared.
Brotteaux was reading Lucretius under the skylight, learning from the
maxims of the Latin poet to live without fears and without desires; but
for all this he felt himself at the moment devoured with regrets and
disquietudes.

Opening her eyes, Athenais was dumfounded to see the roof beams of a
garret above her head. Then she remembered, smiled at her preserver and
extended towards him with a caressing gesture her pretty little dirty
hands.

Rising on her elbow, she pointed to the dilapidated armchair in which
the Monk had passed the night.