Babette laughed aloud,--the idea was grotesque. The two children
were just then ascending the wooden stairs to their bedroom, the
mother carrying a lighted candle behind them, and at that moment the
rich sonorous voice of the Archbishop, raised to a high and somewhat
indignant tone, reached them with these words--"I consider that you
altogether mistake your calling and position."

Then the voice died away into inaudible murmurings.

"They are quarrelling! The Archbishop is angry!" said Henri with a
grin.

"Perhaps Archbishops do not like saints," suggested Babette.

"Tais-toi! Cardinal Bonpre is an archbishop himself, little silly,"
said Madame Patoux--"Therefore those great and distinguished
Monseigneurs are like brothers."

"That is why they are quarrelling!" declared Henri glibly,--"A boy
told me in school that Cain and Abel were the first pair of
brothers, and they quarrelled,--and all brothers have quarrelled
ever since. It's in the blood, so that boy says,--and it is his
excuse always for fighting HIS little brother. His little brother is
six, and he is twelve;--and of course he always knocks his little
brother down. He cannot help it, he says. And he gets books on
physiology and heredity, and he learns in them that whatever is IN
the blood has got to come out somehow. He says that it's because
Cain killed Abel that there are wars between nations;--if Cain and
Abel had never quarrelled, there would never have been any fighting