The company sprawled over a bank to one side of the clearing where the great tree stood. The wine-flasks lay cool in moss. The two countrymen had thrown off their coats and bared their shaggy chests to the night. Overhead the moon was already of a power to strew the forest lanes with travelling blots of shadow, like dead leaves moving on a languid stream. A cricket chirruped here and there in spasms, as if irresistibly tickled by the recollection of some pleasantry. From time to time, across the dim perspective of a glade, a momentary indiscernible shape would steal and vanish. Ned pondered over the enchantment--as moving less prosaic souls--of moonlit haunted woods. “Now, I wonder,” thought he, “if I could put myself _en rapport_ with the undefinable in less Philistine company!” As if in reply, “What would not Nicette interpret of these fairy solitudes?” said a dreamy voice at his back. He turned his head. Théroigne had come softly, and was seated with St Denys a little above him on the bank. “She is not of the club, then?” said Ned. The student laughed truculently, throwing back his head with a noise as if he were gargling. “Little Boppard is beyond himself,” said Ned. “We shall make a man of him yet.” The two potwallopers hooted richly at that. “Monsieur is quick to launch insults,” said Mademoiselle Lambertine frigidly. “Why, what have I said?” The young man looked piously bewildered. St Denys sniggered--even, Ned could have thought, with a little note of vexation. “Friend Edouard,” said he, “in Méricourt the _portière_ Legrand stands pre-canonised.” “Understand!” chuckled a bumpkin. “She is _portière_ and a virgin--save that she bears the sins of the community.” “Beast!” cried Théroigne. Then she went on sarcastically--“To belong to us! Oh yes! but it is likely, is it not? She who communes with the Blessed Virgin like a dear familiar.” “It is so,” said St Denys. “That is her reputation.” He was himself, for all his Jean-Jacques Pyrrhonism, an evident subscriber to a local superstition. “Now,” said the perplexed Englishman, “I perceive that to be oneself is to invite resentment.” “Not to give or take offence,” said Théroigne, with fine impartiality. “Both of which have been done, mademoiselle. So, let us cry quits. And what would Mademoiselle Legrand make of all this?” “How can I tell? She is the saint of dear conceits. She has the inward eye for things invisible to us. ‘Where do the threads of rain disappear to, Théroigne?’ says she. ‘_Oh, mon Dieu_, Nicette! Am I a Cagliostro?’ ‘I think,’ she says, ‘they are pulled into the earth by goblins working at great looms of water. Each thread draws like spun glass from the crucible of the clouds, and so underfoot is woven the network of springs and channels.’ _Ciel_! the quaint sweet child! Whither come her fancies? They are there in the morning like drops of dew.” St Denys broke in with a rippling snatch of song:--