Claude, I bring you a colleague who has desired to see you on account of your reputation.”

“Monsieur belongs to science?” asked the archdeacon, fixing his piercing eye upon Coictier’s companion.

He found beneath the brows of the stranger a glance no less piercing or less distrustful than his own.

He was, so far as the feeble light of the lamp permitted one to judge, an old man about sixty years of age and of medium stature, who appeared somewhat sickly and broken in health. His profile, although of a very ordinary outline, had something powerful and severe about it; his eyes sparkled beneath a very deep superciliary arch, like a light in the depths of a cave; and beneath his cap which was well drawn down and fell upon his nose,