Then the game began.  It was a terrible struggle.  The Brother hurled his cards upon the table.  Whenever he cried out the windows shook sonorously.  La Teuse at last seemed to be winning.  She had secured three aces for some time already, and was casting longing eyes at the fourth.  But Brother Archangias began to indulge in fresh outbursts of gaiety.  He pushed up the table, at the risk of breaking the lamp.  He cheated outrageously, and defended himself by means of the most abominable lies, ‘Just for a joke,’ said he.  Then he suddenly began to sing the ‘Vespers,’ beating time on the palm of his left hand with his cards.  When his gaiety reached a climax, and he could find no adequate means of expressing it, he always took to chanting the ‘Vespers,’ which he repeated for hours at a time.  La Teuse, who well knew his habits, cried out to him, amidst the bellowing with which he shook the room: 

’Make a little less noise, do!  It is quite distracting.  You are much too lively to-night.’

But he set to work on the ‘Complines.’  Abbe Mouret had now seated himself by the window.  He appeared to pay no attention to what went on around him, apparently neither hearing nor seeing anything of it.  At dinner he had eaten with his ordinary appetite and had even managed to reply to Desiree’s everlasting rattle of questions.  But now he had given up the struggle, his strength at an end, racked, exhausted as he was by the internal tempest that still raged within him.  He even lacked the courage to rise from his seat and go upstairs to his own room.  Moreover, he was afraid that if he turned his face towards the lamplight, the tears, which he could no longer keep from his eyes, would be noticed.  So he pressed his face close to the window and gazed out into the darkness, growing gradually more drowsy, sinking into a kind of nightmare stupor.

Brother Archangias, still busy at his psalm-singing, winked and nodded in the direction of the dozing priest.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked La Teuse.

The Brother replied by a yet more significant wink.

’Well, what do you mean?  Can’t you speak?  Ah! there’s a king.  That’s capital!—­so I take your queen.’

The Brother laid down his cards, bent over the table, and whispered close to La Teuse’s face:  ‘That hussy has been here.’

‘I know that well enough,’ answered La Teuse.  ’I saw her go with mademoiselle into the poultry-yard.’

At this he gave her a terrible look, and shook his fist in her face.

’You saw her, and you let her come in!  You ought to have called me, and we would have hung her up by the feet to a nail in your kitchen.’

But at this the old woman lost her temper, and, lowering her voice solely in order that she might not awaken Abbe Mouret, she replied:  ’Don’t you go talking about hanging people up in my kitchen!  I certainly saw her, and I even kept my back turned when she went to join his reverence in the church when the catechising was over.  But all that was no business of mine.  I had my cooking to attend to!  As for the girl herself, I detest her.  But if his reverence wishes to see her—­why, she is welcome to come whenever she pleases.  I’d let her in myself!’