profile,--her charming features full of
suffering, and suffused with tears.

This simple and sublime scene offered a strange contrast,--a singular
coincidence with the horrid one which, almost at the same moment, was
passing in the ravine between the Schoolmaster and the Chouette.
Concealed in the darkness of the sombre cleft, assailed by base fears, a
fearful murderer, carrying on his person the punishment of his crimes,
was also on his knees, but in the presence of an accessory, a sneering,
revengeful Fury, who tormented him mercilessly, and urged him on to
fresh crimes,--that accomplice, the first cause of Fleur-de-Marie's
misery.

Of Fleur-de-Marie, whose days and nights were embittered by never-dying
remorse; whose anguish, hardly endurable, was not conceivable;
surrounded from her earliest days by degraded, cruel, infamous outcasts
of society; leaving the walls of a prison for the den of the
ogress,--even a more horrid prison; never leaving the precincts of her
gaol, or the squalid streets of the Cite; this unhappy young creature
had hitherto lived in utter ignorance of the beautiful and the good, as
strange to noble and religious sentiments as to the magnificent
splendour of nature. Then all that was admirable in the creature and in
the Creator was revealed in a moment to her astonished soul. At this
striking spectacle her mind expanded, her intelligence unfolded itself,
her noble instincts were awakened; and because her mind expanded,
because her intelligence was unfolded, because her noble instincts were
awakened, yet the very consciousness of her early degradation brings
with it the feeling of horror for her past life, alike torturing and
enduring,--she feels, as she had described, that, alas! there are stains
which nothing can remove.

"Ah, unhappiness for me!" said the Goualeuse, in despair; "my whole life
has long to run, it may be; were it as long, as pure as your own,
father, it must henceforth be blighted by the knowledge and
consciousness of the past; unhappiness for me for ever!"

"On the contrary, Marie, it is happiness for you,--yes, happiness for
you. Your remorse, so full of bitterness, but so purifying, testifies
the religious susceptibility of your mind. How many there are who, less
nobly sensitive than you, would, in your place, have soon forgotten the
fact, and only revelled in the delight of the present. Believe me, every
pang that you now endure will tell in your favour when on high. God