"Levez vous toutes, mesdemoiselles!" cried he.
The girls rose. He made them all file off to the other table. He then placed me at one extremity of the long bench, and having duly and carefully brought me my work-basket, silk, scissors, all my implements, he fixed himself quite at the other end.
At this arrangement, highly absurd as it was, not a soul in the room dared to laugh; luckless for the giggler would have been the giggle. As for me, I took it with entire coolness. There I sat, isolated and cut off from human intercourse; I sat and minded my work, and was quiet, and not at all unhappy.
"Est ce assez de distance?" he demanded.
"Monsieur en est l'arbitre," said I.
"Vous savez bien que non. C'est vous qui avez créé ce vide immense: moi je n'y ai pas mis la main."
And with this assertion he commenced the reading. For his misfortune he had chosen a French translation of what he called "un drame de Williams Shackspire; le faux dieu," he further announced, "de ces sots païens, les Anglais." How far other-
