were there appeased. She satisfied there that hunger
for consoling illusions which suffering humanity must satisfy in order
to live. But in her all was happily balanced. At this crisis, in an
epoch overburdened with science, disquieted at the ruins it has made,
and seized with fright in the face of the new century, wildly desiring
to stop and to return to the past, Clotilde kept the happy mean; in her
the passion for truth was broadened by her eagerness to penetrate the
Unknown. If sectarian scientists shut out the horizon to keep strictly
to the phenomenon, it was permitted to her, a good, simple creature, to
reserve the part that she did not know, that she would never know. And
if Pascal's creed was the logical deduction from the whole work, the
eternal question of the Beyond, which she still continued to put to
heaven, reopened the door of the infinite to humanity marching ever
onward. Since we must always learn, while resigning ourselves never
to know all, was it not to will action, life itself, to reserve the
Unknown--an eternal doubt and an eternal hope?

Another sound, as of a wing passing, the light touch of a kiss upon her
hair, this time made her smile. He was surely here; and her whole being
went out toward him, in the great flood of tenderness with which her
heart overflowed. How kind and cheerful he was, and what a love for
others underlay his passionate love of life! Perhaps he, too, had been
only a dreamer, for he had dreamed the most beautiful of dreams, the
final belief in a better world, when science should have bestowed
incalculable power upon man--to accept everything, to turn everything
to our happiness, to know everything and to foresee everything, to
make nature our servant, to live in the tranquillity of intelligence
satisfied. Meantime faith in life, voluntary and regular labor, would
suffice for health. Evil was only the unexplained side of things;
suffering would one day be assuredly utilized. And regarding from above
the enormous labor of the world, seeing the sum total of humanity, good
and bad--admirable, in spite of everything, for their courage and
their industry--she now regarded all mankind as united in a common
brotherhood, she now felt only boundless indulgence, an infinite
pity, and an ardent charity. Love, like the sun, bathes the earth, and
goodness is the great river at which all hearts drink.

Clotilde had been plying her needle for two hours, with the same regular
movement, whi