noisy students, daily devoured and grumbled at the four or five courses
which old Nanon developed out of her inner consciousness and a rather
scantily furnished larder. He questioned Madame Magnotte after dinner,
and was told that the lady was in the house, but was too tired to dine
with the other inmates.

"I have to thank thee for a new boarder, my friend," she said. "Madame
Meynell will not pay largely; but she seems a quiet and respectable
person, and we shall doubtless be well pleased with each other."

"Madame Meynell!" repeated Gustave, congratulating himself on finding
that the Englishwoman was an inhabitant of the house he lived in. "She is
a widow, I suppose?"

"Yes, she is a widow. I asked that question, and she answered, yes.
But she told me nothing of her late husband. She is not at all
communicative."

This was all Gustave could obtain from Madame Magnotte. She was not
communicative. No; she was, indeed, scarcely less silent than that
ghostly lady who had been found sitting at the foot of the guillotine.
There was some kind of mystery involved in her sorrowful face, her silent
apathy. It was possibly the fact of this mystery which interested M.
Lenoble. Certain it is that the young man's interest had been aroused by
this unknown Englishwoman, and that his mind was more occupied by the
image of her whom he had seen but once than by that of his plighted wife.

He waited anxiously for the next day; but on the next day Madame Meynell
still pleaded fatigue and illness. It was only on the third day that she
appeared at the noisy banquet, pale, silent, absent-minded, sheltering