"Yes, come, come!" urged the servant. "My little mistress will be very glad, and it will give her courage to see you."
"It is the devil speaking by your mouth," thought Paul, but unconsciously he followed the girl. He had gripped Antiochus by the shoulder and was drawing him along as a support, and the boy went with him like a plank of safety upon the waves. So they crossed the square and went as far as the presbytery, the servant running on ahead, but turning every few steps to look back at them, the whites of her eyes gleaming in the moonlight. Seen thus at night, the black figure with the dark and mask-like face had truly something diabolical about it, and Paul followed it with a vague sense of fear, leaning on Antiochus's shoulder as he walked and feeling like Tobit in his blindness.
On passing the presbytery door the boy tried to open it, and then Paul perceived that his mother had locked it. He stopped short and disengaged himself from his companion.
"My mother has locked up because she knew in advance that I should not keep my word," he thought to himself; then said to the boy: "Antiochus, you must go home at once."
The servant had stopped also, then went on a few steps, then stopped again and saw the boy returning towards his own home and the priest inserting his key in his door; then she went back to him:
"I am not coming," he said, turning almost threateningly to confront her, and looking her straight in the face as though trying to recognize her true nature through her outward mask; "if you should absolutely need me, you understand--only if you do absolutely need me--you can come back and fetch me."
She went away without another word, and he stood there before his own door, with his hand on the key as though it had refused to turn in the lock. He could not bring himself to enter, it was beyond his power; neither could he go forward in that other path he had begun to tread. He felt as if he were doomed to stand there for all eternity, before a closed door of which he held the key.
Meanwhile Antiochus had reached home. His mother locked the door and he went to wash up the glasses and put them away; and the first glass he washed in the clean water was the one from which _he_ had drunk. The boy dried it very carefully with a white cloth, which he passed round and round inside with his thumb; then he held it up to the flame of the lamp and examined it with one eye, keeping the other screwed up, which had the effect of making the glass shine like a big diamond. Then he hid it away in a secret cupboard of his own with as much reverence as if it had been the chalice of the Mass.