And so for the last year we have not sufficed for our
affairs, and we needed, as you see, a book-keeper."
While speaking, she studied Godefroid's face; he, on his part, did not
know how to take this extraordinary confidence. But as the scene in
the counting-room at Mongenod's came often to his mind, he hovered
between doubt and belief.
"Ah, you will be very happy!" she said.
Godefroid was so consumed with curiosity that from this moment he
determined to break through the reserve of one of the four friends and
question him. Now, the one to whom he felt the most drawn, and who
seemed naturally to excite the sympathies of all classes, was the
kind, gay, simple Monsieur Alain. By what strange path could
Providence have led a being so guileless into this monastery without a
lock, where recluses of both sexes lived beneath a rule in the midst
of Paris, in absolute freedom, as though they were guarded by the
sternest of superiors? What drama, what event, had made him leave his
own road in life, and take this path among the sorrows of the great
city?
Godefroid resolved to ask.
VII
MONSIEUR ALAIN TELLS HIS SECRETS
One evening Godefroid determined to pay a visit to his neighbor on the
floor above him, with the intention of satisfying a curiosity more
excited by the apparent impossibility of a catastrophe in such an
existence than it would have been under the expectation of discovering
some terrible episode in the life of a corsair.
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