“Corps-Dieu! Tête-Dieu! Ventre-Dieu!” answered the captain.

The door opened on the instant, revealing to the newcomers an old woman and an old lamp, both of them trembling. The old woman was bent double, clothed in rags, her palsied head, out of which peered two little blinking eyes, tied up in a kerchief, and wrinkles everywhere— her hands, her face, her neck; her lips were fallen in over her gums, and all round her mouth were tufts of white bristles, giving her the whiskered look of a cat.

The interior of the hovel was no less dilapidated than herself— the plaster dropping from the walls, smoke- blackened beams, a dismantled chimney-piece, cobwebs in every corner; in the middle a tottering company of broken-legged tables and stools, in the cinders a dirty child, and at the back a stair-case, or rather a wooden ladder, leading to a trap-door in the ceiling.

As he entered this den, Phœbus’s mysterious companion pulled his cloak up to his eyes. Meanwhile the captain, swearing like a Saracen, hastened to produce his crown piece.

“The ’Sainte-Marthe room,”’ he said as he presented it.

The old hag treated him like a lord and shut up the ècu in a drawer. It was the coin Phœbus had received from the man in the cloak. No sooner was her back turned, than the little tousle-headed ragamuffin playing in the cinders stole to the drawer, adroitly abstracted the coin, and replaced it by a withered leaf which he plucked from a fagot.

The old woman signed to the two gentlemen, as she entitled them, to follow her, and ascended the ladder. Arrived on the upper floor she set down her lamp upon a chest, and Phœbus, as one knowing the ways of the house, opened a side door giving access to a small dark space.

“In here, my dear fellow,” said he to his companion. The man in the cloak obeyed without a word. The door closed behind him; he heard Phœbus bolt it, and a moment afterward return down the ladder with the old woman. The light had disappeared.