Madame Riennes

About 11 o'clock on the day following this conversation, Godfrey found himself standing on the platform in the big station of Lucerne.

"How are you going to get to Kleindorf?" Miss Ogilvy asked of him. "It's five miles away by the road. I think you had better come to my house and have some déjeuner. Afterwards I will send you there in the carriage."

As she spoke a tall gaunt man in ultra-clerical attire, with a very large hooked nose and wearing a pair of blue spectacles, came shuffling towards them.

"Madame is Engleesh?" he said, peering at her through the blue glasses. "Oh! it is easy to know it, though I am so blind. Has Madame by chance seen a leetle, leetle Engleesh boy, who should arrive out of this train? I look everywhere and I cannot find him, and the conducteur, he says he not there. No leetle boy in the second class. His name it is Godfrey, the son of an English pasteur, a man who fear God in the right way."

There was something so absurd in the old gentleman's appearance and method of address, that Miss Ogilvy, who had a sense of humour, was obliged to turn away to hide her mirth. Recovering, she answered: "I think this is your little boy, Monsieur le Pasteur," and she indicated the tall and handsome Godfrey, who stood gazing at his future instructor open-mouthed. Whoever he had met in his visions, the Pasteur Boiset was not one of them. Never, asleep or waking, had he seen anyone in the least like him.