Your question?"
"Why do you take an interest in me? What price do you set on my
obedience? Why should you give me everything? What is your share?"
The Spaniard looked at Lucien, and a smile came over his face.
"Let us wait till we come to the next hill; we can walk up and talk
out in the open. The back seat of a traveling carriage is not the
place for confidences."
They traveled in silence for sometime; the rapidity of the movement
seemed to increase Lucien's moral intoxication.
"Here is a hill, father," he said at last awakening from a kind of
dream.
"Very well, we will walk." The Abbe called to the postilion to stop,
and the two sprang out upon the road.
"You child," said the Spaniard, taking Lucien by the arm, "have you
ever thought over Otway's _Venice Preserved_? Did you understand the
profound friendship between man and man which binds Pierre and Jaffier
each to each so closely that a woman is as nothing in comparison, and
all social conditions are changed?--Well, so much for the poet."
"So the canon knows something of the drama," thought Lucien. "Have you
read Voltaire?" he asked.
"I have done better," said the other; "I put his doctrine in
practice."
"You do not believe in God?"
"Come! it is I who am the atheist, is it?" the Abbe said, smiling.
"Let us come to practical matters, my child," he added, putting an arm
round Lucien's waist.
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