the minor key, and told her hearer the story of her present.  She revealed to him her long melancholy, the slow malady of her moral being,—­every day a feeling crushed, every night a thought subdued, hour by hour a heart burning down to ashes.  After soft modulations the music took on slowly, tint by tint, the hue of deepest sadness.  Soon it poured forth in echoing torrents the well-springs of grief, till suddenly the higher notes struck clear like the voice of angels, as if to tell to her lost love—­lost, but not forgotten—­that the reunion of their souls must be in heaven, and only there:  hope most precious!  Then came the Amen.  In that no joy, no tears, nor sadness, nor regrets, but a return to God.  The last chord that sounded was grave, solemn, terrible.  The musician revealed the nun in the garb of her vocation; and as the thunder of the basses rolled away, causing the hearer to shudder through his whole being, she seemed to sink into the tomb from which for a brief moment she had risen.  As the echoes slowly ceased to vibrate along the vaulted roofs, the church, made luminous by the music, fell suddenly into profound obscurity.

The general, carried away by the course of this powerful genius, had followed her, step by step, along her way.  He comprehended in their full meaning the pictures that gleamed through that burning symphony; for him those chords told all.  For him, as for the Sister, this poem of sound was the future, the past, the present.  Music, even the music of an opera, is it not to tender and poetic souls, to wounded and suffering hearts, a text which they interpret as their memories need?  If the heart of a poet must be given to a musician, must not poetry and love be listeners ere the great musical works of art are understood?  Religion, love, and music:  are they not the triple expression of one fact, the need of expansion, the need of touching with their own infinite the infinite beyond them, which is in the fibre of all noble souls?  These three forms of poesy end in God, who alone can unwind the knot of earthly emotion.  Thus this holy human trinity joins itself to the holiness of God, of whom we make to ourselves no conception unless we surround him by the fires of love and the golden cymbals of music and light and harmony.

The French general divined that on this desert rock, surrounded by the surging seas, the nun had cherished music to free her soul of the excess of passion that consumed it.  Did she offer her love as a homage to God?  Did the love triumph over the vows she had made to Him?  Questions difficult to answer.  But, beyond all doubt, the lover had found in a heart dead to the world a love as passionate as that which burned within his own.