Nothing was said to Marie about her sins on that afternoon after her uncle had started on his journey.

Everything in the hotel was blank, and sad, and gloomy; but there was, at any rate, the negative comfort of silence, and Marie was allowed to go about the house and do her work without rebuke.

But she observed that the Cure--M.

le Cure Gondin--sat much with her aunt during the evening, and she did not doubt but that she herself and her iniquities made the subject of their discourse.
M.le Cure Gondin, as he was generally called at Granpere,--being always so spoken of, with his full name and title, by the large Protestant portion of the community,--was a man very much respected by all the neighbourhood.

He was respected by the Protestants because he never interfered with them, never told them, either behind their backs or before their faces, that they would be damned as heretics, and never tried the hopeless task of converting them.
In his intercourse with them he dropped the subject of religion altogether,--as a philologist or an entomologist will drop his grammar or his insects in his intercourse with those to whom grammar and insects are matters of indifference.