Words, words! Angelot knew his mother, and knew that whatever pretty speeches politeness might claim, she did not, and never could rejoice in the return of the cousins to Lancilly. But it amused and astonished him to notice the Comte's manner to his mother. Did it please her? he wondered. Gratitude to his father was right and necessary, but did she care for these airs of past and present devotion to herself, on the part of a man who had outraged all her notions of loyalty? It began to dawn on Angelot that he knew little of the world and its ways. Standing in the background, he watched those four, and a more interesting five minutes he had never yet known. These were shadows become real: politics, family and national, turned into persons. There stood his father beside the man to whose advantage he had devoted his life; whom he had loved as that kind of friend who sticks closer than a brother, almost with the adoration of a faithful dog, ever since the boys of the castle and of the old manor played together about the woods of La Marinière and Lancilly. They were a contrast, those two. Urbain was short and broad, with quick eyes, a clever brow, a strong, good-tempered mouth and chin. He was ugly, and far from distinguished: Joseph had carried off the good looks and left the brains for him. Hervé de Sainfoy was tall, slight, elegant; his face was handsome, fair, and sleepy, the lower part weak and irresolute. A beard, if fashion had allowed it, would have become him well. His expression was amiable, his smile charming, with a shade of conscious superiority. But Angelot understood, when he remembered it, the Prefect's remark that the Emperor found Monsieur de Sainfoy "a little half-hearted." However, from that evening, Angelot ceased to think of Monsieur de Sainfoy as the unknown cousin, his father's friend, the master of Lancilly; he was Hélène's father, and thus to be, next to herself, the most important personage in poor Angelot's world. For it is not to be imagined that those few minutes, or even one of them, were spent in noting the contrast between the cousins, or in considering the Comte's manner to Madame de la Marinière, and hers to him. There in the light of the candles, curtseying to the unknown cousin with a simple reverence, accepting her kiss with a faint smile of pleasure, stood the loveliest woman that young Angelot had ever seen, ever dreamed of--if his dreams had been occupied with such matters at all! Hélène was taller than French women generally; taller than his mother, very nearly as tall as himself. She was like a lily, he thought; one of those white lilies that grew in the broad border under the box hedge, and with which his mother decked the Virgin's altar, not listening at all to the poor old Curé when he complained that the scent made his head ache. Hélène had thrown off the hooded cloak that covered her white gown; the lovely masses of fair hair seemed almost too heavy for her small, bent head.