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By Root 618 0

room by a bit of marchpane. In an instant they were good friends. The curious child had removed the bag from the goat’s neck, had opened it, and emptied its contents upon the matting; they consisted of an alphabet, each letter being written upon a separate square of boxwood. No sooner were these playthings scattered over the floor, than the child was amazed to see the goat, one of whose “miracles” this undoubtedly was, select certain letters with her golden hoof and arrange them, by a series of gentle pushes, in a particular order. In a moment a word was spelled out which the goat seemed to have been trained to write, so little did she hesitate in the task; and Bérangère exclaimed suddenly, clasping her hands in admiration, —

“Godmother Fleur-de-Lys, do see what the goat has just done!”

Fleur-de-Lys looked, and shuddered. The letters arranged upon the floor spelled this word:—

“PHŒBUS.”13

“Did the goat do that?” she asked in an altered tone.

“Yes, godmother,” answered Bérangère.

It was impossible to doubt her, for the child could not spell.

“This is her secret!” thought Fleur-de-Lys.

Meantime, at the child’s shout, the whole party hastened to her side,—the mother, the girls, the gipsy, and the officer.

The gipsy saw the folly which her goat had committed. She turned first red, then pale, and trembled like a criminal before the captain, who regarded her with a smile of mingled satisfaction and surprise.

“Phœbus,” whispered the astonished girls. “Why, that’s the captain’s name!”

“You have a marvellous memory!” said Fleur-de-Lys to the stupefied gipsy. Then bursting into sobs, she stammered out in an agony, hiding her face in her lovely hands, “Oh, she is a witch!” and she heard a voice more bitter yet, which said to her inmost heart, “She is your rival!”

She fell fainting to the floor.

“My daughter! my daughter!” screamed the terrified mother. “Begone, you devilish gipsy!”

Esmeralda picked up the unlucky letters in the twinkling of an eye, made a sign to Djali, and went out at one door as Fleur-de-Lys was borne away by another.

Captain Phœbus, left alone, hesitated a moment between the two doors; then he followed the gipsy.

CHAPTER II

Showing that a Priest and a Philosopher Are Two Very Different Persons

The priest whom the girls had noticed on the top of the north tower, leaning over to look into the square and watching the gipsy’s dance so closely, was no other than Claude Frollo.

Our readers have not forgotten the mysterious cell which the archdeacon reserved to himself in that tower. (I do not know, let me observe by the way, whether or not this be the same cell, the interior of which may still be seen through a tiny grated loop-hole, opening to the eastward, at about the height of a man from the floor, upon the platform from which the towers spring; a mere hole, now bare, empty, and dilapidated, the ill-plastered walls “adorned” here and there, at the present time, with a few wretched yellow engravings, representing various cathedral fronts. I presume that this hole is conjointly inhabited by bats and spiders, and that consequently a double war of extermination is waged against flies.)

Every day, an hour before sunset, the archdeacon climbed the tower stairs and shut himself up in this cell, where he often passed whole nights. On this special day, just as, having reached the low door of his retreat, he was fitting into the lock the complicated little key, which he always carried about with him in the purse hanging at his side, the sound of tambourine and castanets struck upon his ear. The sound came from the square in front of the cathedral. The cell, as we have already said, had but one window looking upon the roof of the church. Claude Frollo hastily withdrew the key, and an instant later he was upon the top of the tower, in the gloomy and meditative attitude in which the ladies had seen him.

There he was, serious and motionless, absorbed in one sight, one thought. All Paris lay beneath his feet, with its countless spires and its circular horizon of gently sloping hills, with its river winding