d head, eyes fixed on the ground, mute and still trembling.

The priest gazed at her with the eye of a hawk which has long been
soaring in a circle from the heights of heaven over a poor lark cowering
in the wheat, and has long been silently contracting the formidable
circles of his flight, and has suddenly swooped down upon his prey like
a flash of lightning, and holds it panting in his talons.

She began to murmur in a low voice,--

"Finish! finish! the last blow!" and she drew her head down in terror
between her shoulders, like the lamb awaiting the blow of the butcher's
axe.

"So I inspire you with horror?" he said at length.

She made no reply.

"Do I inspire you with horror?" he repeated.

Her lips contracted, as though with a smile.

"Yes," said she, "the headsman scoffs at the condemned. Here he has been
pursuing me, threatening me, terrifying me for months! Had it not been
for him, my God, how happy it should have been! It was he who cast me
into this abyss! Oh heavens! it was he who killed him! my Phoebus!"

Here, bursting into sobs, and raising her eyes to the priest,--

"Oh! wretch, who are you? What have I done to you? Do you then, hate me
so? Alas! what have you against me?"

"I love thee!" cried the priest.

Her tears suddenly ceased, she gazed at him with the look of an idiot.
He had fallen on his knees and was devouring her with eyes of flame.

"Dost thou understand? I love thee!" he cried again.

"What love!" said the unhappy girl with a shudder.

He resumed,--

"The love of a damned soul."

Both remained silent for several minutes, crushed beneath the weight of
their emotions; he maddened, she stupefied.

"Listen," said the priest at last, and a singular calm had come over
him; "you shall know all I am about to tell you that which I have
hitherto hardly dared to say to myself, when furtively interrogating my
conscience at those deep hours of the night when it is so dark that it
seems as though God no longer saw us. Listen. Before I knew you, young
girl, I was happy."

"So was I!" she sighed feebly.

"Do not interrupt me. Yes, I was happy, at least I believed myself to be
so. I was pure, my soul was filled with limpid light. No head was raised
more proudly and more radiantly than mine. Priests consulted me on
chastity; doctors, on doctrines. Yes, science was all in all to me; it
was a sister to me, and a sister sufficed. Not but that with age other
ideas came to me. More than o