quite different; she soars up in a flame of the spirit.  But all these hypotheses are in vain,” he concluded, “for I cannot judge of her from one brief impression, one rapid view.  What is quite certain is that, though she is not in the least like the Abbe, she too is in two halves—­two persons in one.  He, with the innocent gaze, the pure eyes of a girl at her first Communion, has the sometimes bitter mouth of an old man; she is proud of feature and humble of heart; they both, though by different outward signs and acts, achieve the same result, an identical semblance of paternal indulgence and mature goodness.”

And Durtal had gone again and again to see them.  His reception was always the same; Madame Bavoil greeted him with the invariable formula:  “Here is our friend,” while the priest’s eyes smiled as he grasped his hand.  Whenever he saw Madame Bavoil she was praying:  over her stove, when she sat mending, while she was dusting the furniture, as she opened the door, she was always telling her rosary, without pause.

The chief delight of this rather silent woman consisted in talking of the Virgin to whom she had vowed worship; on the other hand she could quote by memory long passages from a mystic and somewhat eccentric writer of the end of the sixteenth century:  Jeanne Chezard de Matel, the foundress of the Order of the Incarnate Word, an Institution of which the Sisters display a conspicuous costume—­a white dress held round the waist by a belt of scarlet leather, a red cloak and a blood-coloured scapulary on which the name of Jesus is embroidered in blue silk, with a crown of thorns, a heart pierced with three nails, and the words Amor Meus.

At first Durtal thought Madame Bavoil slightly crazy, and while she poured out a passage by Jeanne de Matel on Saint Joseph, he looked at the priest—­who gave no sign.

“Then Madame Bavoil is a saint?” he asked one morning when they were alone.

“My dear Madame Bavoil is a pillar of prayer,” replied the Abbe gravely.

And one afternoon, when Gevresin was away in his turn, Durtal questioned the woman.

She gave him an account of her long pilgrimages across Europe, pilgrimages that she had spent years in making on foot, begging her way by the roadside.

Wherever the Virgin had a sanctuary, thither she went, a bundle of clothing in one hand, an umbrella in the other, an iron Crucifix on her breast, a rosary at her waist.  By a reckoning which she had kept from day to day she had thus travelled ten thousand five hundred leagues on foot.

Then old age had come on, and she had “lost her old powers,” as she said; Heaven had formerly guided her by inward voices, fixing the dates of these expeditions; but journeying was no longer required of her.  She had been sent to live with the Abbe that she might rest; but her manner of life had been laid down for her once for all:  her bed a straw mattress on wooden planks; her food such rustic and monastic fare as beseemed her, milk, honey and bread, and at seasons of penance she was to substitute water for milk.