“Ah, monsieur!” she cried; “I don’t know what’s the matter with mademoiselle; she is—­”

“I know,” said the abbe sadly, stopping the words of the poor nurse.

He then told Ursula (what she had not dared to verify) that Madame de Portenduere had gone to dine at Rouvre.

“And Savinien too?” she asked.

“Yes.”

Ursula was seized with a little nervous tremor which made the abbe quiver as though a whole Leyden jar had been discharged at him; he felt moreover a lasting commotion in his heart.

“So we shall not go there to-night,” he said as gently as he could; “and, my child, it would be better if you did not go there again.  The old lady will receive you in a way to wound your pride.  Monsieur Bongrand and I, who had succeeded in bringing her to consider your marriage, have no idea from what quarter this new influence has come to change her, as it were in a moment.”

“I expect the worst; nothing can surprise me now,” said Ursula in a pained voice.  “In such extremities it is a comfort to feel that we have done nothing to displease God.”

“Submit, dear daughter, and do not seek to fathom the ways of Providence,” said the abbe.

“I shall not unjustly distrust the character of Monsieur de Portenduere—­”

“Why do you no longer call him Savinien?” asked the priest, who detected a slight bitterness in Ursula’s tone.

“Of my dear Savinien,” cried the girl, bursting into tears.  “Yes, my good friend,” she said, sobbing, “a voice tells me he is as noble in heart as he is in race.  He has not only told me that he loves me alone, but he has proved it in a hundred delicate ways, and by restraining heroically his ardent feelings.  Lately when he took the hand I held out to him, that evening when Monsieur Bongrand proposed to me a husband, it was the first time, I swear to you, that I had ever given it.  He began with a jest when he blew me a kiss across the street, but since then our affection has never outwardly passed, as you well know, the narrowest limits.  But I will tell you,—­you who read my soul except in this one region where none but the angels see, —­well, I will tell you, this love has been in me the secret spring of many seeming merits; it made me accept my poverty; it softened the bitterness of my irreparable loss, for my mourning is more perhaps in my clothes now than in my heart—­ Oh, was I wrong? can it be that love was stronger in me than my gratitude to my benefactor, and God has punished me for it?  But how could it be otherwise?  I respected in myself Savinien’s future wife; yes, perhaps I was too proud, perhaps it is that pride which God has humbled.  God alone, as you have often told me, should be the end and object of all our actions.”

The abbe was deeply touched as he watched the tears roll down her pallid face.  The higher her sense of security had been, the lower she was now to fall.