they not have done it
to-day?"

"Then you are very unhappy?" asked the priest, after a silence.

"I am very cold," she replied.

She took her feet in her hands, a gesture habitual with unhappy wretches
who are cold, as we have already seen in the case of the recluse of the
Tour-Roland, and her teeth chattered.

The priest appeared to cast his eyes around the dungeon from beneath his
cowl.

"Without light! without fire! in the water! it is horrible!"

"Yes," she replied, with the bewildered air which unhappiness had given
her. "The day belongs to every one, why do they give me only night?"

"Do you know," resumed the priest, after a fresh silence, "why you are
here?"

"I thought I knew once," she said, passing her thin fingers over her
eyelids, as though to aid her memory, "but I know no longer."

All at once she began to weep like a child.

"I should like to get away from here, sir. I am cold, I am afraid, and
there are creatures which crawl over my body."

"Well, follow me."

So saying, the priest took her arm. The unhappy girl was frozen to her
very soul. Yet that hand produced an impression of cold upon her.

"Oh!" she murmured, "'tis the icy hand of death. Who are you?"

The priest threw back his cowl; she looked. It was the sinister visage
which had so long pursued her; that demon's head which had appeared at
la Falourdel's, above the head of her adored Phoebus; that eye which she
last had seen glittering beside a dagger.

This apparition, always so fatal for her, and which had thus driven her
on from misfortune to misfortune, even to torture, roused her from her
stupor. It seemed to her that the sort of veil which had lain thick upon
her memory was rent away. All the details of her melancholy adventure,
from the nocturnal scene at la Falourdel's to her condemnation to the
Tournelle, recurred to her memory, no longer vague and confused as
heretofore, but distinct, harsh, clear, palpitating, terrible. These
souvenirs, half effaced and almost obliterated by excess of suffering,
were revived by the sombre figure which stood before her, as the
approach of fire causes letters traced upon white paper with invisible
ink, to start out perfectly fresh. It seemed to her that all the wounds
of her heart opened and bled simultaneously.

"Hah!" she cried, with her hands on her eyes, and a convulsive
trembling, "'tis the priest!"

Then she dropped her arms in discouragement, and remained seated, with
lowere