With a strident laugh she passed on to the next room through folding doors. "The principal room," she announced, with that hard irony in her voice, which had, no doubt, penetrated thither from the soul of a mother who had played no small part in the Revolution. "The guest-chamber, one may say, provided that Monsieur le Marquis will sleep on the floor in the drawing-room, or in the straw down below in the stable." The Abbé threw open the shutter of this room also and stood meekly eyeing Marie with a tolerant smile. The room was almost bare of furniture. A bed such as peasants sleep on; a few chairs; a dressing-table tottering against the window-breast, and modestly screened in one corner, the diminutive washing-stand still used in southern France. For Gemosac had been sacked and the furniture built up into a bonfire when Marie was a little child and the Abbé Touvent a fat-faced timorous boy at the Seminary of Saintes. "Beyond is Mademoiselle's room," concluded Marie, curtly. She looked round her and shrugged her shoulders with a grim laugh which made the Abbé shrink. They looked at each other in silence, the two participants in the secret of Gemosac; for Marie's husband, the third who had access to the chateau, did not count. He was a shambling, silent man, now working in the vineyard beneath the walls. He always did what his wife told him, without comment or enthusiasm, knowing well that he would be blamed for doing it badly. The Abbé had visited the rooms once before, during a brief passage of the Marquis, soon after his wife's death in Paris. But, as a rule, only Marie and Jean had access to the apartment. He looked round with an eye always ready with the tear of sympathy; for he was a soft-hearted man. Then he looked at Marie again, shamefacedly. But she, divining his thoughts, shrugged her shoulders. "Ah, bah!" she said, "one must take the world as it is. And Monsieur le Marquis is only a man. One sees that, when he announces his return on washing-day, and brings a guest. You must write to him, that is all, and tell him that with time I can arrange, but not in a hurry like this. Where is the furniture to come from? A chair or two from the banquet-hall; I can lend a bed which Jean can carry in after dark so that no one knows; you have the jug and basin you bought when the Bishop came, that you must lend--" She broke off and ran to the window. "Good," she cried, in a despairing voice, "I hear a carriage coming up the hill. Run, Monsieur l'Abbé--run to the gate and bolt it. Guest or no guest, they cannot see the rooms like this. Here, let me past."