“Monsieur, we are poor,” I answered, “and you are not rich.  We should be a burden to you, and we have no claim upon you.”

“You have a great claim,” he said; “there is not a heart in the parish that does not love you already.  Have not our children died in your arms?  Have you not watched over them? spent sleepless nights and watchful days for them?  How could we endure to see you go away?  Remain with us, madame; live with us, you and my mignonne, whose face is white yet.”

Could I stay then?  It was a very calm, very secure refuge.  There was no danger of discovery.  Yet there was a restlessness in my spirit at war with the half-mournful, half-joyous serenity of the place, where I had seen so many people die, and where there were so many new graves in the little cemetery up the hill.  If I could go away for a while, I might return, and learn to be content amid this tranquillity.

“Madame,” said the pleasant tones of Monsieur Laurentie, “do you know our language well enough to tell me your history now?  You need not prove to me that you are not wicked; tell me how you are unfortunate.  Where were you wandering to that night when I found you at the foot of the Calvary?”

There, in the cool, deepening twilight, I told him my story, little by little; sometimes at a loss for words, and always compelled to speak in the simplest and most direct phrases.  He listened, with no other interruption than to supply me occasionally with an expression when I hesitated.  He appeared to understand me almost by intuition.  It was quite dark before I had finished, and the deep blue of the sky above us was bright with stars.  A glow-worm was moving among the tufts of grass growing between the roots of the tree; and I watched it almost as intently as if I had nothing else to think of.

“Speak to me as if I were your daughter,” I said.  “Have I done right or wrong?  Would you give me up to him, if he came to claim me?”

“I am thinking of thee as my daughter,” he answered, leaning his hands and his white head above them, upon the top of the stick he was holding, and sitting so for some moments in silent thought.  “Thy voice is not the voice of passion,” he continued; “it is the voice of conviction, profound and confirmed.  Thou mayst have fled from him in a paroxysm of wrath, but thy judgment and conscience acquit thee of wrong.  In my eyes it is a sacrament which thou hast broken; yet he had profaned it first.  My daughter, if thy husband returned to thee, penitent, converted, confessing his offences against thee, couldst thou forgive him?”

“Yes,” I answered, “yes!  I could forgive him.”

“Thou wouldst return to him?” he said, in calm, penetrating accents, but so low as to seem almost the voice of my own heart; “thou wouldst be subject to him as the Church is subject to Christ?  He would be thy head; wouldst thou submit thyself unto him as unto the Lord?”

“I shivered with dread as the quiet, solemn tones fell upon my ear, poignantly, as if they must penetrate to my heart.  I could not keep myself from sobbing.  His face was turned toward me in the dusk, and I covered mine with my hands.