“Madame Delphine!”

Yet surprise could hardly have been altogether absent, for though another Sunday had not yet come around, the slim, smallish figure sitting in a corner, looking very much alone, and clad in dark attire, which seemed to have been washed a trifle too often, was Delphine Carraze on her second visit.  And this, he was confident, was over and above an attendance in the confessional, where he was sure he had recognized her voice.

She rose bashfully and gave her hand, then looked to the floor, and began a faltering speech, with a swallowing motion in the throat, smiled weakly and commenced again, speaking, as before, in a gentle, low note, frequently lifting up and casting down her eyes while shadows of anxiety and smiles of apology chased each other rapidly across her face.  She was trying to ask his advice.

“Sit down,” said he; and when they had taken seats she resumed, with downcast eyes: 

“You know,—­probably I should have said this in the confessional, but”—­

“No matter, Madame Delphine; I understand; you did not want an oracle, perhaps; you want a friend.”

She lifted her eyes, shining with tears, and dropped them again.

“I”—­she ceased.  “I have done a”—­she dropped her head and shook it despondingly—­“a cruel thing.”  The tears rolled from her eyes as she turned away her face.

Pere Jerome remained silent, and presently she turned again, with the evident intention of speaking at length.

“It began nineteen years ago—­by”—­her eyes, which she had lifted, fell lower than ever, her brow and neck were suffused with blushes, and she murmured—­“I fell in love.”

She said no more, and by and by Pere Jerome replied: 

“Well, Madame Delphine, to love is the right of every soul.  I believe in love.  If your love was pure and lawful I am sure your angel guardian smiled upon you; and if it was not, I cannot say you have nothing to answer for, and yet I think God may have said ’She is a quadroone; all the rights of her womanhood trampled in the mire, sin made easy to her—­almost compulsory,—­charge it to account of whom it may concern.’”

“No, no!” said Madame Delphine, looking up quickly, “some of it might fall upon”—­Her eyes fell, and she commenced biting her lips and nervously pinching little folds in her skirt.  “He was good—­as good as the law would let him be—­better, indeed, for he left me property, which really the strict law does not allow.  He loved our little daughter very much.  He wrote to his mother and sisters, owning all his error and asking them to take the child and bring her up.  I sent her to them when he died, which was soon after, and did not see my child for sixteen years.  But we wrote to each other all the time, and she loved me.  And then—­at last”—­Madame Delphine ceased speaking, but went on diligently with her agitated fingers, turning down foolish hems lengthwise of her lap.