ye
fixed unweariedly on him; and how could he crush the viper?

What could he do? What could he venture? He remembered hearing of priests
who had fled away with young girls whom they had seduced, and he thought
for an instant that he would carry off Suzanne and fly.

Willingly would he have left behind him his honour and his reputation,
willingly would he have torn his priestly robe on the sharp points of
infamy and scandal, willingly would he have quitted for ever that cursed
parsonage where shame and humiliation, vice and remorse were henceforth
installed; but Suzanne, would she follow him?

Then, had he well weighed the mortifications which await the apostate
priest!

To be nameless in society, with no future, repulsed, despised, scoffed at
by all!

Should he, like the Pere Hyacinth, go and found a free church in some
corner of the republic, and rove through Europe, like him, to confer about
morality, the rights of women and virtue?

Would not poverty come and knock at his door? Poverty with a beloved wife!
It would appear a hideous and terrifying spectre, chilling in its livid
approach and in its kisses of love.

To struggle against these obstacles he would need high energy and high
courage, and he felt that courage and energy were lacking in him, the
miserable coward, who had shamefully succumbed to the clumsy artifices of a
lascivious woman, who had allowed the first fruits of his virginity and his
youth to be lost in shameful debauch; while close by there was an adorable
maiden whose heart was beating in unison with his own.

Thus did his reflection lead him till the end of the Gospel, and when he
said the _Deo gratias_ he had as yet decided nothing.

LXXVI.

AWAKENING.

"We never permit with impunity
the mind to analyze the liberty to
indulge in certain loves; once begin
to reflect on those deep and troublesome
matters which are called _passion_ and
_duty_, the soul which naturally delights
in the investigation of every truth, is
unable to stop in its exploration."

ERNEST FRYDEAU (_La Comtesse de Chalis_).

When Marcel had gone away, Suzanne, when she had quietly shut the
street-door, by which she had gone out, went upstairs to her room and sat
down on the side of her bed.

She asked herself if she had not just been the sport of an hallucination,
if it was really true that a man had gone out of the house, who had held
her in his arms, to whom she had yielded hersel