ials?"

"Here they are."

"Pass them through the box."

"Where is it?"

"To your left."

Philippe Goulenoire put the letter through the slit of an iron box above
which was a loophole.

"The devil!" thought he, "plainly the king comes here, as they say he
does; he couldn't take more precautions at Plessis."

He waited for more than a quarter of an hour in the street. After that
lapse of time, he heard Cornelius saying to his sister, "Close the traps
of the door."

A clinking of chains resounded from within. Philippe heard the bolts
run, the locks creak, and presently a small low door, iron-bound, opened
to the slightest distance through which a man could pass. At the risk of
tearing off his clothing, Philippe squeezed himself rather than walked
into La Malemaison. A toothless old woman with a hatchet face, the
eyebrows projecting like the handles of a cauldron, the nose and chin
so near together that a nut could scarcely pass between them,--a pallid,
haggard creature, her hollow temples composed apparently of only bones
and nerves,--guided the "soi-disant" foreigner silently into a lower
room, while Cornelius followed prudently behind him.

"Sit there," she said to Philippe, showing him a three-legged stool
placed at the corner of a carved stone fireplace, where there was no
fire.

On the other side of the chimney-piece was a walnut table with
twisted legs, on which was an egg in a plate and ten or a dozen little
bread-sops, hard and dry and cut with studied parsimony. Two stools
placed beside the table, on one of which the old woman sat down, showed
that the miserly pair were eating their suppers. Cornelius went to the
door and pushed two iron shutters into their place, closing, no doubt,
the loopholes through which they had been gazing into the street; then
he returned to his seat. Philippe Goulenoire (so called) next beheld the
brother and sister dipping their sops into the egg in turn, and with
the utmost gravity and the same precision with which soldiers dip their
spoons in regular rotation into the mess-pot. This performance was done
in silence. But as he ate, Cornelius examined the false apprentice with
as much care and scrutiny as if he were weighing an old coin.

Philippe, feeling that an icy mantle had descended on his shoulders, was
tempted to look about him; but, with the circumspection dictated by all
amorous enterprises, he was careful not to glance, even furtively, at
the walls; for he fully