She led me on and on, until I began to wonder what could be her
destination. She avoided the streets of fine shops, such as were
patronized by the court, skirted market-places, and continued, in a
general easterly direction, until she had crossed both the Rue St. Denis
and the Rue St. Martin. At last, turning out of the Rue St. Antoine, she
reached, by a little street lined with bakeries, a quiet square before a
small church, of which I never even learned the name. She and the stout
woman dismounted, and entered the church, leaving her male attendants
outside with the horse.
"Oho," I mused, stopping at the door of a pastry-cook's at the place
where the little street joined the square; "she chooses an obscure place
for her devotions. Evidently she prefers to mingle solitude with them, so
I must not disturb her."
I decided, therefore, to wait at the pastry-cook's till she should come
out, and then to encounter her as if by chance. I would have, at least, a
word in payment for having come so far afoot.
The pastry-cook must have been convinced of two things before Mlle.
d'Arency came out of church: first, that his fortune was made if this new
customer, myself, should only continue to patronize him; second, that
there existed, at least, one human stomach able to withstand unlimited
quantities of his wares.
I stood back in the shop, devouring one doughy invention after another,
with my ear alert for the sound of her horse's hoofs on the stones.
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