It is as distinct as a nightmare to me.  Abonus came in with his great server laden with victuals.  He stumbled as he approached.  He too was excited.  He drew near, and stood behind me.  I seemed to feel his breath penetrate my skull; and yet I was forced to answer a whispered question of Brother John’s with a smooth face.  I saw Edouard suddenly reach for the milk glass in front of his plate, and hand it back to Abonus with the disdain of a duchess.  He said, in a sharp, peremptory tone: 

“Take it away and cleanse it.  No one but a dirty monk would place such a glass on the table.”

Albert ceased his reading.  Abonus did not touch the glass.  He shuffled hastily to the side-board and deposited his burden.  Then he came back with the same eager movement.  He placed his fists on his hips, like a fish-woman, and hissed, in a voice choking with concentrated rage—­

“No one but a woman would complain of it!”

The brothers stared at each other and the two speakers in mute surprise.  But they saw nothing in the words beyond a personal wrangle—­though even that was such a novelty as to arrest instant attention.  I busied myself with my plate.  The Director assumed his harshest tone, and asked the cause of the altercation.  Abonus leaned over and whispered something in his ear.  I remember next a room full of confusion, a babel of conflicting voices, and a whirling glimpse of uniforms.  Then I fainted.

When I revived I was in my own room, stretched upon my pallet.  I looked around in a dazed way and saw the Brother Director and a young gendarme by the closed door.  Something black and irregular in the outline of the bed at my side attracted my eyes.  I saw that it was Edouard’s head buried in the drapery.  As in a dream I laid my numb hand upon those crisp curls.  I was an old man, she a weak, wretched girl.  She raised her face at my touch, and burned in my brain a vision of stricken agony, of horrible soul-pain, which we liken, for want of a better simile, to the anguish in the eyes of a dying doe.  Her lips moved; she said something, I know not what.  Then she went, and I was left alone with Elysee.  His words—­broken, stumbling words—­I remember: 

“She asked to see you, Sebastian, my friend.  I could not refuse.  Her papers were forged.  She did come from Algiers, where her uncle is a Capuchin.  I do not ask, I do not wish to know, how much you know of this.  Before my Redeemer, I feel nothing but pity for the poor lamb.  Lie still, my friend; try to sleep.  We are both older men than we were yesterday.”

There is little else to tell.  Only twice have reflections of this episode in my old life reached me in the seclusion of a missionary post at the foot of the Andes.  I learned a few weeks ago that the wretched Abonus had bought a sailor’s cafe on the Toulon wharves with his five thousand francs.  And I know also that the heart of the Marshal-President was touched by the sad story of Renee, and that she left the prison La Salpetriere to lay herself in penitence at the foot of Mother Church.  This is the story of my friendship.