Christian King evidently stirred this nun's heart to the depths.
She was a Frenchwoman beyond mistake. Soon the love of country shone
out, breaking forth like shafts of light from the fugue, as the sister
introduced variations with all a Parisienne's fastidious taste, and
blended vague suggestions of our grandest national airs with her music.
A Spaniard's fingers would not have brought this warmth into a
graceful tribute paid to the victorious arms of France. The musician's
nationality was revealed.

"We find France everywhere, it seems," said one of the men.

The General had left the church during the _Te Deum_; he could not
listen any longer. The nun's music had been a revelation of a woman
loved to frenzy; a woman so carefully hidden from the world's eyes,
so deeply buried in the bosom of the Church, that hitherto the most
ingenious and persistent efforts made by men who brought great influence
and unusual powers to bear upon the search had failed to find her. The
suspicion aroused in the General's heart became all but a certainty with
the vague reminiscence of a sad, delicious melody, the air of _Fleuve
du Tage_. The woman he loved had played the prelude to the ballad in
a boudoir in Paris, how often! and now this nun had chosen the song
to express an exile's longing, amid the joy of those that triumphed.
Terrible sensation! To hope for the resurrection of a lost love, to find
her only to know that she was lost, to catch a mysterious glimpse of her
after five years--five years, in which the pent-up passion, chafing
in an empty life, had grown the mightier for every fruitless effort to
satisfy it!

Who has not known, at least once in his life, what it is to lose some
precious thing; and after hunting through his papers, ransacking his
memory, and turning his house upside down; after one or two days spent
in vain search, and hope, and despair; after a prodigious expenditure
of the liveliest irritation of soul, who has not known the ineffable
pleasure of finding that all-important nothing which had come to be a
king of monomania? Very good. Now, spread that fury of search over five
years; put a woman, put a heart, put love in the place of the trifle;
transpose the monomania into the key of high passion; and, furthermore,
let the seeker be a man of ardent temper, with a lion's heart and a
leonine head and mane, a man to inspire awe and fear in those who come
in contact with him--realise this, and you may, perhaps, un