no pleasure in its grace.  She felt a heartrending pang to think that thenceforward the consummate things of art would have no meaning for her.  She had seen Arthur the evening before, and remembered with an agony of shame the lies to which she had been forced in order to explain why she could not see him till late that day.  He had proposed that they should go to Versailles, and was bitterly disappointed when she told him they could not, as usual on Sundays, spend the whole day together.  He accepted her excuse that she had to visit a sick friend.  It would not have been so intolerable if he had suspected her of deceit, and his reproaches would have hardened her heart.  It was his entire confidence which was so difficult to bear.

‘Oh, if I could only make a clean breast of it all,’ she cried.

The bell of Saint Sulpice was ringing for vespers.  Margaret walked slowly to the church, and sat down in the seats reserved in the transept for the needy.  She hoped that the music she must hear there would rest her soul, and perhaps she might be able to pray.  Of late she had not dared.  There was a pleasant darkness in the place, and its large simplicity was soothing.  In her exhaustion, she watched listlessly the people go to and fro.  Behind her was a priest in the confessional.  A little peasant girl, in a Breton coiffe, perhaps a maid-servant lately come from her native village to the great capital, passed in and knelt down.  Margaret could hear her muttered words, and at intervals the deep voice of the priest.  In three minutes she tripped neatly away.  She looked so fresh in her plain black dress, so healthy and innocent, that Margaret could not restrain a sob of envy.  The child had so little to confess, a few puny errors which must excite a smile on the lips of the gentle priest, and her candid spirit was like snow.  Margaret would have given anything to kneel down and whisper in those passionless ears all that she suffered, but the priest’s faith and hers were not the same.  They spoke a different tongue, not of the lips only but of the soul, and he would not listen to the words of an heretic.

A long procession of seminarists came in from the college which is under the shadow of that great church, two by two, in black cassocks and short white surplices.  Many were tonsured already.  Some were quite young.  Margaret watched their faces, wondering if they were tormented by such agony as she.  But they had a living faith to sustain them, and if some, as was plain, were narrow and obtuse, they had at least a fixed rule which prevented them from swerving into treacherous byways.  One of two had a wan ascetic look, such as the saints may have had when the terror of life was known to them only in the imaginings of the cloister.  The canons of the church followed in their more gorgeous vestments, and finally the officiating clergy.