in a cow-house or a cave, as chance may
direct, and to-morrow by daybreak they will start again on their
weariful way."

Durtal was overpowered by the radiant splendour of such faith.

It was possible, then, to find souls ever young, souls ever new, souls
as of undying children, watching where absolute solitude was not,
outside cloister walls, in the waste places of these peaks and gorges,
and amid this race of stern and rugged peasants. Here were women who,
without knowing it even, lived the contemplative life in union with God,
while they dug the barren slopes of a little plot at some prodigious
elevation. They were Leah and Rachel, Martha and Mary in one; and these
women believed guilelessly, entirely, as man believed in the middle
ages. These beings, with their rough-hewn feelings, their shapeless
ideas, hardly able to express themselves, hardly knowing how to read,
wept with love in the presence of the Inaccessible, whom they compelled
by their humility and single-heartedness to appear, to become actual to
their mind.

"Yes, it was but just that the Virgin should cherish them and choose
them above all others to be Her vessels of election.

"Yes. For they are unburdened with the dreadful weight of doubt, they
are endowed with almost total ignorance of evil.

"And yet are there not some souls too experienced, alas! in the culture
of wrong-doing, who nevertheless find mercy at Her feet? Has not the
Virgin other sanctuaries less frequented, less well known, which yet
have outlived the wear of time, the various caprice of the ages; very
ancient churches where She welcomes you if you love Her in solitude and
silence?"

And Durtal, coming back to Chartres once more, looked about him at the
persons who were waiting in the warm shade of the indefinite forest till
the Virgin should awake, to worship Her.

With dawn, now beginning to break, this forest of the church under whose
shade he was sitting became absolutely unintelligible. The shapes,
faintly sketched, were transformed in the gloom which blurred every
outline as it slowly faded. Below, in the vanishing mist, rose the
immemorial trunks of fabulous white trees, planted as it seemed in wells
that held them tightly in the rigid circle of their margin; and the
night, now almost diaphanous on the level of the ground, was thicker as
it rose, cutting them off at the spring of the branches, which were
still invisible.

Durtal, as he raised his head, gazed into deep