her young nor handsome, he had
charmed so many women. Stranger still it was, that after getting thus
compromised, he swayed opinion to such a degree. For a while, he
seemed to have enchanted the whole town.

The truth was, that everyone knew the strength of the Jesuits. Nobody
cared to quarrel with them. It was hardly reckoned safe to speak ill
of them, even in a whisper. The bulk of the priesthood consisted of
monklings of the Mendicant orders, who had no powerful friends or high
connections. The Carmelites themselves, jealous and hurt as they were
at losing Cadiere, kept silence. Her brother, the young Jacobin, was
lectured by his trembling mother into resuming his old circumspect
ways. Becoming reconciled to Girard, he came at length to serve him as
devotedly as did his younger brother, even lending himself to a
curious trick by which people were led to believe that Girard had the
gift of prophecy.

* * * * *

Such weak opposition as he might have to fear, would come only from
the very person whom he seemed to have most thoroughly mastered.
Submissive hitherto, Cadiere now gave some slight tokens of a coming
independence which could not help showing itself. On the 30th of
April, at a country party got up by the polite Girard, and to which he
sent his troop of young devotees in company with Guiol, Cadiere fell
into deep thought. The fair spring-time, in that climate so very
charming, lifted her heart up to God. She exclaimed with a feeling of
true piety, "Thee, Thee only, do I seek, O Lord! Thine angels are not
enough for me." Then one of the party, a blithesome girl, having, in
the Provencial fashion, hung a tambourine round her neck, Cadiere
skipped and danced about like the rest; with a rug thrown across her
shoulders, she danced the Bohemian measure, and made herself giddy
with a hundred mad capers.

She was very unsettled. In May she got leave from her mother to make a
trip to Sainte-Baume, to the Church of St. Mary Magdalen, the chief
saint of girls on penance. Girard would only let her go under charge
of two faithful overlookers, Guiol and Reboul. But though she had
still some trances on the way, she showed herself weary of being a
passive tool to the violent spirit, whether divine or devilish, that
annoyed her. The end of her year's _possession_ was not far off. Had
she not won her freedom? Once issued forth from the gloom and
witcheries of Toulon, into the open air, in the