Mme. de Marquesse wished to go. Zozé gracefully stood in her way, her arms stretched across the portière in a Sarah Bernhardt attitude. "No! not yet!... Am I not right, dear master? Mme. de Marquesse cannot go like this?" M. Raindal agreed silently. Zozé rang the bell and had port wine and biscuits brought in. The latter had a taste of vanilla for which M. Raindal showed great partiality. Mme. Chambannes wrote down for him the address of the confectioner who sold them. Mme. de Marquesse pretended to know a better brand. Each of the two praised her own dealer. The port wine had enlivened them--and, laughingly, forefingers stretched out, they taxed each other with appalling cases of _gourmandise_. They called upon the master to act as referee but he gallantly declined. The argument made him laugh--and also the port wine, for he had drunk two glasses in quick succession, and his temples were warming up. "Well, we are forgetting our work!" Zozé exclaimed suddenly. Before M. Raindal had time to word a reply, the curtain was once more drawn aside. A bald, corpulent ecclesiastic, who seemed to be in his fifties and wore a broad smile under his broad spectacles, advanced slowly into the room. "Ah! it is you, my dear abbé!" Zozé exclaimed in a tone which showed so much sincere surprise that it was hard to guess whether the priest's visit had been planned beforehand or brought about by mere hazard. She introduced the men to each other: "M. l'abbé Touronde, director of the Villedouillet orphanage, our neighbor in the country and one of our best friends ... M. Raindal...." The master bowed with the ceremonious affectation he always showed in order to dissimulate his aversion towards those of the cloth. Respectfully, the abbé asked, with a slight Southern accent: "M. Raindal, the author of the _Life of Cleopatra_?" "Quite so!" Zozé confirmed. The abbé Touronde congratulated him profusely. He was not acquainted with the book itself, but had read enough accounts of it in the newspapers, to speak of it freely. He praised the master upon some particular chapters. M. Raindal thanked him with modest gestures of his hand as if he were fending off the compliments. But the abbé went on, in a slightly droning voice. The book appealed to him all the more because he was no stranger to its subject matter. He had once studied Egyptian history thoroughly for a brochure he was preparing concerning the sect of the United Coptic Church. He had, moreover, published in the _Annals of Christian Archeology_, two articles dealing with the Hagiographs of the Thebaid. M. Raindal confessed he had not read them; and the abbé volunteered "if it were not too indiscreet" to send the issues of the periodical that contained them.