They went out of the courtyard into the road and had scarcely taken twenty steps when they ran across a priest in a woven cassock, who was wending his way homeward.
He perceived at the other end of the room, near a small window with yellow panes decorated with badly kept flower vases, a man seated at a table, and covered with a dilapidated cassock.
The roan was close at hand, and in another instant all would have been safe; but as the figure in the scarlet cassock stepped forward, the Gadfly suddenly wavered and the hand with the pistol sank down.
Finally, when she puton her cassock, the man could not bear the proof that, indeed, she was not wearing anything underneath, as everyone had suspected, and he felt himself marked forever with the white-hot iron of that secret.