direction--they were
pregnant with her presence, all the same!"

"Surely She revisited that spot, in spite of Her apparent desertion, to
comfort all comers; She seemed so close at hand, so attentive and so
grieving, in the evening as one sat alone by the light of a candle, that
the soul seemed to burst open like a pod shedding the fruit of sin, the
seeds of evil deeds; and repentance, that had been so tardily evolved,
and sometimes so indefinite, became so suddenly despotic and
unmistakable that the penitent dropped on his knees by the bed, and
buried his head sobbing in the sheets. Ah, those were evenings of mortal
dulness and yet sweetly sad! The soul was rent, its very fibres laid
bare, but was not the Virgin at hand, so pitiful, so motherly, that
after, the worst was over She took the bleeding soul in her arms and
rocked it to sleep like a sick child.

"Then, during the day, the church afforded a refuge from the frenzy of
giddiness that came over one; the eye, bewildered by the precipices on
every side, distracted by the sight of the clouds that suddenly gathered
below and steamed off in white fleece from the sides of the rocks, found
rest under the shelter of those walls.

"And finally, to make up for the horrors of the scene and of the
statues, to mitigate the grotesqueness of the inn-servants, who had
beards like sappers and clothes like little boys--the caps, and holland
blouses with belts, and shiny black breeches, like cast iron, of the
children at the Saint Nicolas school in Paris--extraordinary characters,
souls of divine simplicity expanded there."

And Durtal recollected the admirable scene he had watched there one
morning.

He was sitting on the little plateau, in the icy shade of the church,
gazing before him at the graveyard and the motionless swell of mountain
tops. Far away, in the very sky, a string of beads moved on, one by one,
on the ribbon of path that edged the precipice. And by degrees these
specks, at first merely dark, assumed the bright hues of dresses,
assumed the form of coloured bells surmounted by white knobs, and at
last took shape as a line of peasant women wearing white caps.

And still in single file they came down the square.

After crossing themselves as they passed the cemetery, they went each to
drink a cup of water at the spring and then turned round; and Durtal,
who was watching them, saw this:

At their head walked an old woman of at least a hundred, very tall and
st