to think that thenceforward the consummate things
of art would have no meaning for her. She had seen Arthur the evening
before, and remembered with an agony of shame the lies to which she had
been forced in order to explain why she could not see him till late that
day. He had proposed that they should go to Versailles, and was bitterly
disappointed when she told him they could not, as usual on Sundays, spend
the whole day together. He accepted her excuse that she had to visit a
sick friend. It would not have been so intolerable if he had suspected
her of deceit, and his reproaches would have hardened her heart. It was
his entire confidence which was so difficult to bear.

'Oh, if I could only make a clean breast of it all,' she cried.

The bell of Saint Sulpice was ringing for vespers. Margaret walked slowly
to the church, and sat down in the seats reserved in the transept for the
needy. She hoped that the music she must hear there would rest her soul,
and perhaps she might be able to pray. Of late she had not dared. There
was a pleasant darkness in the place, and its large simplicity was
soothing. In her exhaustion, she watched listlessly the people go to and
fro. Behind her was a priest in the confessional. A little peasant girl,
in a Breton _coiffe_, perhaps a maid-servant lately come from her native
village to the great capital, passed in and knelt down. Margaret could
hear her muttered words, and at intervals the deep voice of the priest.
In three minutes she tripped neatly away. She looked so fresh in her
plain black dress, so healthy and innocent, that Margaret could not
restrain a sob of envy. The child had so little to confess, a few puny
errors which must excite a smile on the lips of the gentle priest, and
her candid spirit was like snow. Margaret would have given anything to
kneel down and whisper in those passionless ears all that she suffered,
but the priest's faith and hers were not the same. They spoke a different
tongue, not of the lips only but of the soul, and he would not listen to
the words of an heretic.

A long procession of seminarists came in from the college which is under
the shadow of that great church, two by two, in black cassocks and short
white surplices. Many were tonsured already. Some were quite young.
Margaret watched their faces, wondering if they were tormented by such
agony as she. But they had a living faith to sustain them, and if some,
as was plain, were narrow and obtuse, the