Sabine was waiting for him at this moment upon this glorious day in August. Père Anselme was going to breakfast with her.
He was announced presently, courtly and spare and distinguished in his thread-bare soutane, and they went in to the breakfast-room, a round chamber in the adjoining tower which had kitchens beneath. The walls were here so thick, that only the sky could be seen from any window except the southeastern one, from which you reviewed the gray slate roofs of the later building within the courtyard, the part which had been always habitable and which contained the salons and the guest chambers, with only an oblique view of the sea. Here, in Héronac's mistress' own apartments, the waves eternally encircled the base, and on rough days rose in great clouds of spray almost to the deep mullions.
"I am having visitors, Père Anselme," Sabine remarked, when Nicholas, her fat butler, was handing the omelette. "Madame Imogen is enchanted," and she smiled at that lady who had been waiting for déjeuner in the room before they had entered.
"_Tant mieux!_" responded the priest, with his mouth full of egg and mushroom. In his youth, the Héronacs had not imported English nurses, and he ate as his fathers had done before him.
"So much the better. Our lady is too given to solitude, and but for the meteor-like descents of the Princess Torniloni and her tamed father--" (he used the word _aprivoisé_--"_son père aprivoisé_"!) "we should here see very little of the outside world. And of what sex, madame, are these new acquaintances, if one may ask?"
"They are men, _cher père_--bold, bad Englishmen!--think of it! but I can only tell you the name of one of them--the other is problematical--he has merely been spoken of as, 'My friend'--but he is young, I gather, so just the affaire of Mère Imogen!"
"Why, that's likely!" chirped Madame Imogen, with a strong American accent, in her French English. "But I do pine for some gay things down here, don't you, Father?"
Père Anselme was heard to murmur that he found youth enough in his hostess, if you asked him.
"At the same time, we must welcome these Englishmen," he added, "should they be people of cultivation." He had heard that, in their upper classes, the Englishmen of to-day were still the greatest gentlemen left, and he would be pleased to meet examples of them.