rant life; saying all, accepting all, solely through the love of
energy and effort, believing in the work of the world, placing the
meaning of destiny in the labor which we all accomplish with love, in
our desperate eagerness to live, to love, to live anew, to live always,
in spite of all the abominations and miseries of life. Oh, to live, to
live! This is the great task, the work that always goes on, and that
will doubtless one day be completed!"

Silent still, he smiled radiantly, and kissed her on the mouth.

"And, master, though I have always loved you, even from my earliest
youth, it was, I believe, on that terrible night that you marked me for,
and made me your own. You remember how you crushed me in your grasp. It
left a bruise, and a few drops of blood on my shoulder. Then your being
entered, as it were into mine. We struggled; you were the stronger, and
from that time I have felt the need of a support. At first I thought
myself humiliated; then I saw that it was but an infinitely sweet
submission. I always felt your power within me. A gesture of your hand
in the distance thrilled me as though it had touched me. I would have
wished that you had seized me again in your grasp, that you had crushed
me in it, until my being had mingled with yours forever. And I was
not blind; I knew well that your wish was the same as mine, that the
violence which had made me yours had made you mine; that you struggled
with yourself not to seize me and hold me as I passed by you. To nurse
you when you were ill was some slight satisfaction. From that time,
light began to break upon me, and I at last understood. I went no more
to church, I began to be happy near you, you had become certainty and
happiness. Do you remember that I cried to you, in the threshing yard,
that something was wanting in our affection. There was a void in it
which I longed to fill. What could be wanting to us unless it were God?
And it was God--love, and life."

VIII.

Then came a period of idyllic happiness. Clotilde was the spring, the
tardy rejuvenation that came to Pascal in his declining years. She came,
bringing to him, with her love, sunshine and flowers. Their rapture
lifted them above the earth; and all this youth she bestowed on him
after his thirty years of toil, when he was already weary and worn
probing the frightful wounds of humanity. He revived in the light of her
great shining eyes, in the fragrance of her pure breath. He had faith
ag