least like the Abbé, she too is in two halves--two persons in one. He,
with the innocent gaze, the pure eyes of a girl at her first Communion,
has the sometimes bitter mouth of an old man; she is proud of feature
and humble of heart; they both, though by different outward signs and
acts, achieve the same result, an identical semblance of paternal
indulgence and mature goodness."

And Durtal had gone again and again to see them. His reception was
always the same; Madame Bavoil greeted him with the invariable formula:
"Here is our friend," while the priest's eyes smiled as he grasped his
hand. Whenever he saw Madame Bavoil she was praying: over her stove,
when she sat mending, while she was dusting the furniture, as she opened
the door, she was always telling her rosary, without pause.

The chief delight of this rather silent woman consisted in talking of
the Virgin to whom she had vowed worship; on the other hand she could
quote by memory long passages from a mystic and somewhat eccentric
writer of the end of the sixteenth century: Jeanne Chézard de Matel, the
foundress of the Order of the Incarnate Word, an Institution of which
the Sisters display a conspicuous costume--a white dress held round the
waist by a belt of scarlet leather, a red cloak and a blood-coloured
scapulary on which the name of Jesus is embroidered in blue silk, with a
crown of thorns, a heart pierced with three nails, and the words _Amor
Meus_.

At first Durtal thought Madame Bavoil slightly crazy, and while she
poured out a passage by Jeanne de Matel on Saint Joseph, he looked at
the priest--who gave no sign.

"Then Madame Bavoil is a saint?" he asked one morning when they were