"Yes," he repeated, "I must speak to him--but how? Of her? That will be very difficult, but let him once see her and my cause will be won. She is so refined, so pretty, such a lady!--Of the inventories? It is impossible. She understood me at once, devout as she is. Their religion is not the same. To her the Church is the faith. Those who haven't it are simply to be pitied. To him the Church is like the monarchy, like the nobility, the essential condition of public order. It is the hierarchy that guarantees all the others. What answer can I make? I should think as he does if our time were not our time." Soliloquizing thus he reached the side of the Church of Saint-François-Xavier, at the spot where he had left his automobile. His chauffeur, when he did not return, had left his car in the care of one of the numerous idlers who transform that isolated square into a club of bicyclists and tennis-players, and had gone to refresh himself at one of the wine-shops in the neighborhood. "Deuce take it!" said the young man ill-humoredly, "Auguste isn't here! I shall never get to Grandchamp. I sha'n't have any lunch, that's all," he concluded. "But how is the machine?" and while the small boy who had been left in charge of the vehicle ran off to fetch the conscienceless chauffeur, he began to examine the different parts of the machine with a connoisseur's eye. That too was one of the small points upon which he had based his self-esteem as a "modernist." He understood how to repair and handle his automobile as well as a professional. "Everything is in order," he said. "I will drive myself. We shall go faster, and I shall not irritate my nerves by thinking." He began therefore to put on the cloak and cap and goggles and gloves of the profession, and Auguste had no sooner joined him, than he started his heavy machine with as much precision as if he had not borne the name of Landri, which denoted in the family of Claviers-Grandchamp pretensions more or less justified--but they date back to the twelfth century--of descending from the kings of the first race. And this car of the latest model bore on its panels the curious arms which, with the device, _E tenebris inclarescent_, symbolize that legendary origin: three frogs _or_ on a field _sable_. These were, according to some authorities in heraldry, the arms of our first kings. Géliot waxed wroth over it long ago, in his "Vraye et parfaite science des armoiries."[1] He saw therein only three roughly executed fleurs-de-lys. He would have enjoyed maintaining that opinion before the choleric marquis. "And to think," reflected the heir of the pseudo-Merovingian, "that it took years to make my father admit the mere idea of the telephone, of electricity and the automobile! But at last we have one, and of an excellent make. I shall be there before the hunt is over."