"Agatha—I believe she will be calendered one day. To me she is amongst the saints already. You must go and see her, Cousin Adrienne. She lives with her cheery, hard-working sister in a little house at the top of a green knoll outside the village. I always wonder at such a suitable position being their home. But it was their home before Agatha was born. Her father was a chemist by profession, and also a scholar. You climb if you go to see Agatha, physically and mentally. She is a modern Joan of Arc, without her fiery enthusiasm, but she lives in the unseen, and has her visions." "She sounds awfully interesting," said Adrienne. The Countess shrugged her shoulders. "The peasants are superstitious; they regard a sick girl as a seer and mystic. She fosters their credulity and poses as a saint." "We will pass on," said Guy in his cool way, "to Nicholas Bruce the good-tempered blacksmith, to André Gaugy the talkative backbiter and tailor, to stolid Ambrose Hellier with his placid wife and sixteen children under fifteen, and who makes his cows and goats support them all, to Jacques Smuré our drunkard, and Anton Guyère our gloomy cobbler, and Gaspard Pont our newsmonger the postman. "There are twenty-five families in all, living round us. I see ma mère is impatient! She will doubtless describe our outside neighbours better than I can." The Countess was already rising from her seat, and Adrienne followed her back to the salon. Candles were lighted in it now. The wood fire was blazing cheerfully. Adrienne drew up a chair close to it, and her aunt lay back in a deep cushioned chair opposite her. "Guy is strangely indifferent to good society," the Countess said with a sigh; "he seems quite happy gossiping with the farmers and peasants. I cannot get him to accompany me to any bridge parties or tennis or tea. He hates my flat in Orleans, and wants me to give it up. As if I could vegetate in this place all the winter!" She began talking to Adrienne about her great friend Madame Nicholas, a rich widow, who lived about a couple of miles away in a very large villa, of the Marquise de Pompagny, who had two pretty daughters and a son, and of several other friends in the vicinity of the Château. And then a little later Guy joined them. It was Adrienne who suggested that he should play to them. They went out into the hall, but the Countess found it chilly, and retired to her chair by the fire. They left the salon door open for her to hear. Adrienne sat down on a couch under one of the windows, which were now shuttered up for the night. The organ was at the farther end of the hall, and worked by water power. In the dusk there, with only the dim lights of candles above the organ seat, Adrienne let Guy's enchanted music steal through her soul. He played on, aware that one of his listeners at least could appreciate his performance. The Countess appeared at last.