who, without really thinking one word of what they said, kept
repeating to her: "How _could_ he have turned against you?--so kind and
gentle as you are!" or, "Console yourself, dear Mademoiselle Gamard,
you are so well known that--" et cetera.

Nevertheless, these friends, enchanted to escape one evening a week in
the Cloister, the darkest, dreariest, and most out of the way corner
in Tours, blessed the poor vicar in their hearts.

Between persons who are perpetually in each other's company dislike or
love increases daily; every moment brings reasons to love or hate each
other more and more. The Abbe Birotteau soon became intolerable to
Mademoiselle Gamard. Eighteen months after she had taken him to board,
and at the moment when the worthy man was mistaking the silence of
hatred for the peacefulness of content, and applauding himself for
having, as he said, "managed matters so well with the old maid," he
was really the object of an underhand persecution and a vengeance
deliberately planned. The four marked circumstances of the locked
door, the forgotten slippers, the lack of fire, and the removal of the
candlestick, were the first signs that revealed to him a terrible
enmity, the final consequences of which were destined not to strike
him until the time came when they were irreparable.

As he went to bed the worthy vicar worked his brains--quite uselessly,
for he was soon at the end of them--to explain to himself the
extraordinarily discourteous conduct of Mademoiselle Gamard. The fact
was that, having all along acted logically in obeying the natural laws
of his own egotism, it was impossible that he should now perceive his
own faults towards his landlady.