Yet in spite of this check, and while the Mass of thanksgiving was being sung, suddenly and secretly the drama widened into an interest as profound as any that ever moved the heart of man.  The Sister who played the organ roused an enthusiasm so vivid that not one soldier present regretted the order which had brought him to the church.  The men listened to the music with pleasure; the officers were carried away by it.  As for the general, he remained to all appearance calm and cold:  the feelings with which he heard the notes given forth by the nun are among the small number of earthly things whose expression is withheld from impotent human speech, but which—­like death, like God, like eternity—­can be perceived only at their slender point of contact with the heart of man.  By a strange chance the music of the organ seemed to be that of Rossini,—­a composer who more than any other has carried human passion into the art of music, and whose works by their number and extent will some day inspire an Homeric respect.  From among the scores of this fine genius the nun seemed to have chiefly studied that of Moses in Egypt; doubtless because the feelings of sacred music are there carried to the highest pitch.  Perhaps these two souls—­one so gloriously European, the other unknown—­had met together in some intuitive perception of the same poetic thought.  This idea occurred to two officers now present, true dilettanti, who no doubt keenly regretted the Theatre Favart in their Spanish exile.  At last, at the Te Deum, it was impossible not to recognize a French soul in the character which the music suddenly took on.  The triumph of his Most Christian Majesty evidently roused to joy the heart of that cloistered nun.  Surely she was a Frenchwoman.  Presently the patriotic spirit burst forth, sparkling like a jet of light through the antiphonals of the organ, as the Sister recalled melodies breathing the delicacy of Parisian taste, and blended them with vague memories of our national anthems.  Spanish hands could not have put into this graceful homage paid to victorious arms the fire that thus betrayed the origin of the musician.

“France is everywhere!” said a soldier.

The general left the church during the Te Deum; it was impossible for him to listen to it.  The notes of the musician revealed to him a woman loved to madness; who had buried herself so deeply in the heart of religion, hid herself so carefully away from the sight of the world, that up to this time she had escaped the keen search of men armed not only with immense power, but with great sagacity and intelligence.  The hopes which had wakened in the general’s heart seemed justified as he listened to the vague echo of a tender and melancholy air, ’La Fleuve du Tage,’—­a ballad whose prelude he had often heard in Paris in the boudoir of the woman he loved, and which this nun now used to express, amid the joys of the conquerors, the suffering of an exiled heart.  Terrible moment! to long for the resurrection of a lost love; to find that love—­still lost; to meet it mysteriously after five years in which passion, exasperated by the void, had been intensified by the useless efforts made to satisfy it.