It was a day of ill-luck and penance for our esteemed churchman, for no single wish of his was to be gratified, even in so small a matter as a meal. The three brothers were pushed with scant ceremony into the one imposing chamber of the chateau, whose walls were tolerably thick and windows placed too high for escape to be possible, and there they were left, gruesomely to contemplate one another, uncomely spectacle enough, for in truth, they looked like boon companions, whose night had been spent in orgies. The abbé was so blythe in the knowledge that his fate was sealed, and that he had in his recklessness given himself as it were with his own foot, the final kick out of the world, that he overflowed with amiability. To behold Clovis, the selfish and heartless, the superficially plausible scientific humbug, sobbing like a woman, with tears showering through dirty fingers, was a joy and a triumph, for whatever might befall the abbé though only a half brother with no prospect of ever blossoming into a full-blown marquis, he never, no, never, under any stress whatever, could fall so low as this grovelling male Niobe, who had been privileged by Destiny to wear the glittering thing called coronet. Not that that particular covering was in vogue as a fashionable hat just now, but the absurd era of topsyturvydom, would no doubt be smothered shortly by somebody with an uncompromising will and iron fist, and the saturnalia of plebeian folly be suppressed. Then coronets would rise in the market again, and this gibbering thing would come strutting back from exile--a worm on end--with other emigrants, to enjoy again the sweets of life. He would be free and rich, while his brothers bore the brunt. He would possibly speak now and again with reticence of his unfortunately shady family connections, who had tried to commit murder in his absence, and swear with seraphic gaze fixed upon æther, that he was well quit of such surroundings. Ah! It was a satisfaction to think that a sturdy spoke had been placed in the wheel of the heaven-bound chariot, which had brought it down to earth with a thump, as helpless as a hamstrung horse. If the half-brothers were to bear the burthen of their misdeeds, so should the elder one. He should not escape scot-free. "If," swore the abbé to himself, "we are to be broken on the wheel, as de Vaux so genially suggests, the only boon I will crave shall be that Clovis the coward shall suffer first, and that I may be present as eye witness." Such being his somewhat decided views with regard to the head of the family, it was rather odd that he should be so agreeable and frolicsome and, metaphorically, skip around his brother. After a while, the contemplation of the weeping Clovis and the dazed Phebus became irksome, and there being no signs of prospective breakfast, Pharamond turned his attention to another matter. "Tell me," he demanded of a sudden, "why did you delay at Blois so long, and what brought you so quickly home?"