tness.

Caudray and Deruchette stood face to face, looking into each other's
eyes, and holding each other by the hand. Deruchette was speaking.
Caudray was silent. A tear that had gathered upon his eyelash hung there
and did not fall.

Grief and strong passion were imprinted in his calm, religious
countenance. A painful resignation was there too--a resignation hostile
to faith, though springing from it. Upon that face, simply devout until
then, there was the commencement of a fatal expression. He who had
hitherto meditated only on doctrine, had begun to meditate on Fate, an
unhealthy meditation for a priest. Faith dissolves under its action.
Nothing disturbs the religious mind more than that bending under the
weight of the unknown. Life seems a perpetual succession of events, to
which man submits. We never know from which direction the sudden blow
will come. Misery and happiness enter or make their exit, like
unexpected guests. Their laws, their orbit, their principle of
gravitation, are beyond man's grasp. Virtue conducts not to happiness,
nor crime to retribution: conscience has one logic, fate another; and
neither coincide. Nothing is foreseen. We live confusedly, and from hand
to mouth. Conscience is the straight line, life is the whirlwind, which
creates above man's head either black chaos or the blue sky. Fate does
not practise the art of gradations. Her wheel turns sometimes so fast
that we can scarcely distinguish the interval between one revolution and
another, or the link between yesterday and to-day. Caudray was a
believer whose faith did not exclude reason, and whose priestly training
did not shut him out from passion. Those religious systems which impose
celibacy on the priesthood are not without reason for it. Nothing really
destroys the individuality of the priest more than love. All sorts of
clouds seemed to darken Caudray's soul. He looked too long into
Deruchette's eyes. These two beings worshipped each other.

There was in Caudray's eye the mute adoration of despair.

Deruchette spoke.

"You must not leave me. I shall not have strength. I thought I could bid
you farewell. I cannot. Why did you come yesterday? You should not have
come if you were going so soon. I never spoke to you. I loved you; but
knew it not. Only that day, when M. Herode read to us the story of
Rebecca, and when your eyes met mine, my cheeks were like fire, and I
thought only of how Rebecca's face must have burnt like mine; an