Can they bring peace to the troubled soul of a lonely and unhappy girl?  Have you not already laid waste my future, giving me memories which will never cease to revisit me?  Henceforth I can only give myself to God, but will He accept a broken heart?  He has had some purpose to fulfil in sending these afflictions to me; doubtless it was His will that I should turn to Him, my only refuge here below.  Nothing remains to me here upon this earth.  You have all a man’s ambitions wherewith to beguile your sorrows.  I do not say this as a reproach; it is a sort of religious consolation.  If we both bear a grievous burden at this moment, I think that my share of it is the heavier.  He in whom I have put my trust, and of whom you can feel no jealousy, has joined our lives together, and He puts them asunder according to His will.  I have seen that your religious beliefs were not founded upon the pure and living faith which alone enables us to bear our woes here below.  Monsieur, if God will vouchsafe to hear my fervent and ceaseless prayers, He will cause His light to shine in your soul.  Farewell, you who should have been my guide, you whom once I had the right to call “my beloved,” no one can reproach me if I pray for you still.  God orders our days as it pleases Him.  Perhaps you may be the first whom He will call to himself; but if I am left alone in the world, then, monsieur, intrust the care of the child to me.’

“This letter, so full of generous sentiments, disappointed my hopes,” Benassis resumed, “so that at first I could think of nothing but my misery; afterwards I welcomed the balm which, in her forgetfulness of self, she had tried to pour into my wounds, but in my first despair I wrote to her somewhat bitterly: 

“Mademoiselle—­that word alone will tell you that at your bidding I renounce you.  There is something indescribably sweet in obeying one we love, who puts us to the torture.  You are right.  I acquiesce in my condemnation.  Once I slighted a girl’s devotion; it is fitting, therefore, that my love should be rejected to-day.  But I little thought that my punishment was to be dealt to me by the woman at whose feet I had laid my life.  I never expected that such harshness, perhaps I should say, such rigid virtue, lurked in a heart that seemed to be so loving and so tender.  At this moment the full strength of my love is revealed to me; it has survived the most terrible of all trials, the scorn you have shown for me by severing without regret the ties that bound us.  Farewell for ever.  There still remains to me the proud humility of repentance; I will find some sphere of life where I can expiate the errors to which you, the mediator between Heaven and me, have shown no mercy.  Perhaps God may be less inexorable.  My sufferings, sufferings full of the thought of you, shall be the penance of a heart which will never be healed, which will bleed in solitude.  For a wounded heart—­shadow and silence.