poor cherub!" she went on, looking about the room. "How smart and
winning he is! Ah! your fine gentry are made of other stuff than we
are."

And Jacqueline went down again after smoothing down the bed-coverlet,
dusting the chest, and wondering for the hundredth time in six months:

"What in the world does he do all the blessed day? He cannot always be
staring at the blue sky and the stars that God has hung up there like
lanterns. That dear boy has known trouble. But why do he and the old
man hardly ever speak to each other?"

Then she lost herself in wonderment and in thoughts which, in her
woman's brain, were tangled like a skein of thread.

The old man and his young companion had gone into one of the schools
for which the Rue du Fouarre was at that time famous throughout
Europe. At the moment when Jacqueline's two lodgers arrived at the old
School des Quatre Nations, the celebrated Sigier, the most noted
Doctor of Mystical Theology of the University of Paris, was mounting
his pulpit in a spacious low room on a level with the street. The cold
stones were strewn with clean straw, on which several of his disciples
knelt on one knee, writing on the other, to enable them to take notes
from the Master's improvised discourse, in the shorthand abbreviations
which are the despair of modern decipherers.

The hall was full, not of students only, but of the most distinguished
men belonging to the clergy, the court, and the legal faculty. There
were some learned foreigners, too--soldiers and rich citizens. The
broad faces were there, with prominent brows and venerable beards,