have allowed the impure breath of the world to have soiled this little
flower. She loves you and her father more than one can say." Her
father's friend found the girl dressed in the costume of a novice, and
was told that she had expressed her desire to take, one day, her final
vows. He informed Marie of her father's dying state, of his earnest wish
to see her for the last time, and told her that he had come to take
her to his bedside. "Take me away from here?" she exclaimed. The Mother
Superior, surprised at her apparent reluctance to go, impressed on her
the duty of acceding to her father's wish. To the astonishment of both,
Marie refused to leave the convent. If she could save her father's life,
she said, she would go, but, as that was impossible and she dreaded
going out into the world again, she would stay and pray for her father
in the chapel of the convent, where her prayers would be quite as
effective as by his bedside. In vain the friend and the Mother Superior
tried to bend her resolution.

Happily M. Boyer died before he could learn of his daughter's singular
refusal. But it had made an unfavourable impression on the friend's
mind. He looked on Marie as a girl without real feeling, an egoist, her
religion purely superficial, hiding a cold and selfish disposition; he
felt some doubt as to the future development of her character.

M. Boyer left a widow, a dark handsome woman, forty years of age.

Some twenty years before his death, Marie Salat had come to live with
M. Boyer as a domestic servant. He fell in love with her, she became his
mistress, and a few months before the birth of Marie, M. Boyer made her
his wife. Madame Boyer was at heart a woman of ardent and voluptuous
passions that only wanted opportunity to become careless in their
gratification. Her husband's long illness gave her such an opportunity.
At the time of his death she was carrying on an intrigue with a
bookseller's assistant, Leon Vitalis, a young man of twenty-one. Her
bed-ridden husband, ignorant of her infidelity, accepted gratefully
the help of Vitalis, whom his wife described as a relative, in the
regulation of his affairs. At length the unsuspecting Boyer died. The
night of his death Madame Boyer spent with her lover.

The mother had never felt any great affection for her only child.

During her husband's lifetime she was glad to have Marie out of the way
at the convent. But the death of M. Boyer changed the situation. He
had left