M. de la Lande was proposed, seconded, and carried almost unanimously. The Bishop of Lisieux turned to his angry brother prelate, and whispered: ‘Now we have got your own man in. You see what may be done with good-humour. If you had attempted to browbeat those curés any longer, they would have elected as their second representative a more furious democrat than even Lindet himself.’ ‘I have had humiliations enough to bear without being made the butt of your jokes before a rabble,’ answered Monseigneur de Narbonne, sullenly. CHAPTER XVII. Gabrielle had found a temporary asylum at the house of Robert Lindet, the lawyer. Robert lived in a small villa, with his brother Peter, on the side of the road to Brionne and Rouen. The house stood back from the dusty highway, with a long strip of garden before it, and a high wall completely shutting it off from the road. A row of trees occupied one side of the garden, ending in a green ivy-covered arbour, in which no one ever sat, as it occupied an angle in the high walls, and commanded no view, and was by its position excluded from air and light. The garden was poor. Two little patches of flowers--larkspur and escholtzia and white lilies--were nearly the only ones that grew in it; the two former sowed themselves, and the latter remained where it had been planted in Robert’s youth. The rest of the garden was turf. On it stood a hutch of white rabbits with black noses, which were constantly escaping over the garden and destroying the flowers. The house front consisted of two parts, the portion occupied by the lawyer and his brother, and that given over to the cook and kitchen, which latter portion was an incongruous adjunct to the trim little house. The kitchen was on the ground-floor, and a ladder staircase in the open air gave access to the bedroom above. The house--little altered--is at present the abode of the Chaplain to the Convent of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament. The lower rooms of the house being turned into offices, the brothers were wont, in cold weather, to sit over the fire in the kitchen, where Gabrielle presided. Gabrielle was not happy. That last piercing cry of her protectress and friend, Madame Berthier, had entered her heart, and stuck there like a barbed arrow. As she lay awake at night, she thought of the huge prison, dark and cold, down whose passages no sunbeams streamed, and of the poor lady alone there, in solitude and despair. During the day she thought of her,--of the cold she must feel in her cell, of the deprivation of scenes of beauty and life. ‘I ought to do something for her, but what can I do!’ She asked those who knew anything about Paris whether there would be a possibility of her obtaining admission to the Bastille, to wait upon the prisoner, but they all replied with a shake of the head.