leaning over the balustrade and simply looking. At first, directly
under her was the garden, darkened by the eternal shade of the evergreen
box-trees; in the corner nearest the church, a cluster of small
lilac-bushes surrounded an old granite bench; while in the opposite
corner, half hidden by a beautiful ivy which covered the whole wall
at the end as if with a mantle, was a little door opening upon the
Clos-Marie, a vast, uncultivated field. This Clos-Marie was the old
orchard of the monks. A rivulet of purest spring-water crossed it, the
Chevrotte, where the women who occupied the houses in the neighbourhood
had the privilege of washing their linen; certain poor people sheltered
themselves in the ruins of an old tumble-down mill; and no other persons
inhabited this field, which was connected with the Rue Magloire simply
by the narrow lane of the Guerdaches, which passed between the high
walls of the Bishop's Palace and those of the Hotel Voincourt. In
summer, the centenarian elms of the two parks barred with their
green-leaved tops the straight, limited horizon which in the centre
was cut off by the gigantic brow of the Cathedral. Thus shut in on
all sides, the Clos-Marie slept in the quiet peace of its abandonment,
overrun with weeds and wild grass, planted with poplars and willows sown
by the wind. Among the great pebbles the Chevrotte leaped, singing as it
went, and making a continuous music as if of crystal.

Angelique was never weary of this out-of-the-way nook. Yet for seven
years she had seen there each morning only what she had looked at on the
previous evening. The trees in the little park of the Hotel Voincourt,
whose front was on the Grand Rue, were so tufted and bushy that it
was only in the winter she could occasionally catch a glimpse of the
daughter of the Countess, Mademoiselle Claire, a young girl of her own
age.