her own ill-health with the young health and blooming beauty of the
other. But the abbess tenderly urged her request.

Under the influence of a fondling so close and so continual, she
deemed that Girard would be forgotten. With all abbesses it had become
the ruling fancy, the pet ambition, to confess their own nuns,
according to the practice allowed by St. Theresa. By this pleasant
scheme of hers the same result would come out of itself, the young
woman telling her confessors only of small things, but keeping the
depths of her heart for one particular person. Caressed continually by
one curious woman, at eventide, in the night, when her head was on the
pillow, she would have let out many a secret, whether her own or
another's.

From this living entanglement she could not free herself at the
first. She slept with the abbess. The latter thought she held her fast
by a twofold tie, by the opposite means employed on the saint and on
the woman; that is, on the nervous, sensitive, and, through her
weakness, perhaps sensual girl. Her story, her sayings, whatever fell
from her lips, were all written down. From other sources she picked up
the meanest details of her physical life, and forwarded the report
thereof to Toulon. She would have made her an idol, a pretty little
pet doll. On a slope so slippery the work of allurement doubtless
moved apace. But the girl had scruples and a kind of fear. She made
one great effort, of which her weak health would have made her seem
incapable. She humbly asked leave to quit that dove's-nest, that couch
too soft and delicate, to go and live in common with the novices or
the boarders.

Great was the abbess's surprise; great her mortification. She fancied
herself scorned. She took a spite against the thankless girl, and
never forgave her.

* * * * *

From the others Cadiere met with a very pleasant welcome. The mistress
of the novices, Madame de Lescot, a nun from Paris, refined and good,
was a worthier woman than the abbess. She seemed to understand the
other--to see in her a poor prey of fate, a young heart full of God,
but cruelly branded by some eccentric spell which seemed like to hurry
her onward to disgrace, to some unhappy end. She busied herself
entirely with looking after the girl, saving her from her own
rashness, interpreting her to others, excusing those things which
might in her be least excusable.

Saving the two or three noble ladies who live