owed only the cold breeze, but never the sun, to enter from without,
she did not appear to suffer or even to think. One would have said that
she had turned to stone with the cell, ice with the season. Her hands
were clasped, her eyes fixed. At first sight one took her for a spectre;
at the second, for a statue.

Nevertheless, at intervals, her blue lips half opened to admit a breath,
and trembled, but as dead and as mechanical as the leaves which the wind
sweeps aside.

Nevertheless, from her dull eyes there escaped a look, an ineffable
look, a profound, lugubrious, imperturbable look, incessantly fixed upon
a corner of the cell which could not be seen from without; a gaze which
seemed to fix all the sombre thoughts of that soul in distress upon some
mysterious object.

Such was the creature who had received, from her habitation, the name of
the "recluse"; and, from her garment, the name of "the sacked nun."

The three women, for Gervaise had rejoined Mahiette and Oudarde, gazed
through the window. Their heads intercepted the feeble light in the
cell, without the wretched being whom they thus deprived of it seeming
to pay any attention to them. "Do not let us trouble her," said Oudarde,
in a low voice, "she is in her ecstasy; she is praying."

Meanwhile, Mahiette was gazing with ever-increasing anxiety at that wan,
withered, dishevelled head, and her eyes filled with tears. "This is
very singular," she murmured.

She thrust her head through the bars, and succeeded in casting a glance
at the corner where the gaze of the unhappy woman was immovably riveted.

When she withdrew her head from the window, her countenance was
inundated with tears.

"What do you call that woman?" she asked Oudarde.

Oudarde replied,--

"We call her Sister Gudule."

"And I," returned Mahiette, "call her Paquette la Chantefleurie."

Then, laying her finger on her lips, she motioned to the astounded
Oudarde to thrust her head through the window and look.

Oudarde looked and beheld, in the corner where the eyes of the
recluse were fixed in that sombre ecstasy, a tiny shoe of pink satin,
embroidered with a thousand fanciful designs in gold and silver.

Gervaise looked after Oudarde, and then the three women, gazing upon the
unhappy mother, began to weep.

But neither their looks nor their tears disturbed the recluse. Her hands
remained clasped; her lips mute; her eyes fixed; and that little shoe,
thus gazed at, broke the heart of a