And the priest had replied: 

“Religion is not of dogma.  The paganism of Dame Sabine is as good in the sight of le bon Dieu as the belief of Jean Rivee, who knows that his boat was guided into the harbor on the night of the great storm by the Holy Virgin, who posed Herself by the helm.  Heavens! yes—­it is God who judges—­not priests.”

It can be easily understood that with two minds of this breadth, Pere Anselme and Sabine Howard became real friends.

The Cure, when he read with her the masters of the dix-septieme and the dix-huitieme had a quaintly humorous expression in his old black eye.

“Not for girls or for priests—­but for des gens du monde,” he said to her one day, on putting down a volume of Voltaire.

“Of what matter,” Sabine had answered.  “Since I am not a girl, cher maitre, and you were once not a priest, and we are both gens du monde—­hein?”

His breeding had been of enormous advantage to him, enabling him to refrain from asking Sabine a single question; but he knew from her ejaculations as time went on that she had passed through some furnace during her eighteenth year, and it had seared her deeply.  He even knew more than this; he knew almost as much as Simone, eventually, but it was all locked in his breast and never even alluded to between them.

Sabine was waiting for him at this moment upon this glorious day in August.  Pere Anselme was going to breakfast with her.

He was announced presently, courtly and spare and distinguished in his thread-bare soutane, and they went in to the breakfast-room, a round chamber in the adjoining tower which had kitchens beneath.  The walls were here so thick, that only the sky could be seen from any window except the southeastern one, from which you reviewed the gray slate roofs of the later building within the courtyard, the part which had been always habitable and which contained the salons and the guest chambers, with only an oblique view of the sea.  Here, in Heronac’s mistress’ own apartments, the waves eternally encircled the base, and on rough days rose in great clouds of spray almost to the deep mullions.

“I am having visitors, Pere Anselme,” Sabine remarked, when Nicholas, her fat butler, was handing the omelette.  “Madame Imogen is enchanted,” and she smiled at that lady who had been waiting for dejeuner in the room before they had entered.

“Tant mieux!” responded the priest, with his mouth full of egg and mushroom.  In his youth, the Heronacs had not imported English nurses, and he ate as his fathers had done before him.

“So much the better.  Our lady is too given to solitude, and but for the meteor-like descents of the Princess Torniloni and her tamed father—­” (he used the word aprivoise—­“son pere aprivoise"!) “we should here see very little of the outside world.  And of what sex, madame, are these new acquaintances, if one may ask?”