roud,
loving wife, the spirited, beautiful boys, the dainty little
daughter--no, he could not relinquish them.

"She is vowed to the Church now, and is at rest. Nothing you can say
will disturb her. The good Bishop of Montreal absolved her from her
wrongful vow. While we hold marriage as sacred and indissoluble, it has
to be a true marriage and with the sanction of the Church. This had no
priestly blessing or benediction. And she repented of it. For years she
has been in the service of the Lord."

He was glad to hear this. Down in his heart he knew how she had
tormented her tender conscience with vain and rigorous questions and had
made herself unhappy in pondering them. But he thought their new life
together would neutralize this tendency and bring them closer in unison.
Had she, indeed, made such a sad mistake in her feelings as to give him
only an enthusiastic but temporary affection, when she was ready to
throw up all the beliefs and the training of her youth? But then the
convent round looked dreary to her.

Jeanne came from the room where she had been listening to her mother's
story of self-blame and present abhorrence for the step she had so
unwisely taken in yielding to one who should have been nothing to her.

"But you loved him then!" cried Jeanne, vehemently, thinking of the
other woman whose joy and pride was centered in the Sieur Angelot.

"It was a sinful fancy, a temptation of the evil one. I should have
struggled against it. I should have resigned myself to the life laid out
for me. A man's love is a delusion. Oh, my child, there is nothing like
the continual service of God to keep one from evil. The joys of the
world are but as dust and ashes, nay, worse, they leave an ineradicable
stain that not even prayer and penance can wash out. And this is why I
have come to warn, to reclaim you, if possible. When I heard the story
from a devoted young sister, whose name in the world was Berthe Campeau,
I said I must go and snatch the soul of my child from the shadow of
perdition that hangs over her."

Berthe Campeau! How strange it was that the other mother, nearing the
end of life, should have plead with her child to stay a little longer in
the world and wait until she was gone before she buried herself in
convent walls!

Was it a happy life, even a life of resignation, that had left such
lines in her mother's face? She was hardly in the prime of life, but
she looked old already. Instead of being drawn t