eard that--at last, at last!"

"I repeat--of the honour thus deferred, I never doubted." The Superieure
hurried on. "Greater joy it has been to me to hear from the same
venerable source that, while found bravest among the defenders of your
country, you are clear from all alliance with the assailants of your
God. Continue so, continue so, Victor de Mauleon."

She retreated to the door, and then turned towards him with a look in
which all the marble had melted away, adding, with words more formally
nunlike, yet unmistakably womanlike, than those which had gone before,
"That to the last you may be true to God, is a prayer never by me
omitted."

She spoke, and vanished.

In a kind of dim and dreamlike bewilderment, Victor de Mauleon found
himself without the walls of the convent. Mechanically, as a man
does when the routine of his life is presented to him, from the first
Minister of State to the poor clown at a suburban theatre, doomed
to appear at their posts, to prose on a Beer Bill, or grin through a
horse-collar, though their hearts are bleeding at every pore with some
household or secret affliction,--mechanically De Mauldon went his way
towards the ramparts, at a section of which he daily drilled his raw
recruits. Proverbial for his severity towards those who offended,
for the cordiality of his praise of those who pleased his soldierly
judgment, no change of his demeanour was visible that morning, save
that he might be somewhat milder to the one, somewhat less hearty to the
other. This routine duty done, he passed slowly towards a more deserted
because a more exposed part of the defences, and seated himself on
the frozen sward alone. The cannon thundered around him. He heard
unconsciously: from time to time an obus hissed and splintered close at
his feet;--he saw with abstracted eye. His soul was with the past; and,
brooding over all that in the past lay buried there, came over him a
conviction of the vanity of the human earth-bounded objects for which
we burn or freeze, far more absolute than had grown out of the worldly
cynicism connected with his worldly ambition. The sight of that face,
associated with the one pure romance of his reckless youth, the face
of one so estranged, so serenely aloft from all memories of youth, of
romance, of passion, smote him in the midst of the new hopes of the new
career, as the look on the skull of the woman he had so loved and so
mourned, when disburied from her grave, smote the