“Yes; I know that you are proud and resolute,” said the abbe, “and because I respect you more than any woman in the world I want you to live, and be free, and make a marriage worthy of you, so that in the human family you may fill the part which beautiful souls still know how to make noble.  Besides, you are necessary to your father; your death would hurry him to his grave, hearty and robust as the Mauprat still is.  Put away these gloomy thoughts, then, and these violent resolutions.  It is impossible.  This adventure of Roche-Mauprat must be looked upon only as an evil dream.  We both had a nightmare in those hours of horror; but it is time for us to awake; we cannot remain paralyzed with fear like children.  You have only one course open to you, and that I have already pointed out.”

“But, abbe, it is the one which I hold the most impossible of all.  I have sworn by everything that is most sacred in the universe and the human heart.”

“An oath extorted by threats and violence is binding on none; even human laws decree this.  Divine laws, especially in a case of this nature, absolve the human conscience beyond a doubt.  If you were orthodox, I would go to Rome—­yes, I would go on foot—­to get you absolved from so rash a vow; but you are not a submissive child of the Pope, Edmee—­nor am I.”

“You wish me, then, to perjure myself?”

“Your soul would not be perjured.”

“My soul would!  I took an oath with a full knowledge of what I was doing and at a time when I might have killed myself on the spot; for in my hand I had a knife three times as large as this.  But I wanted to live; above all, I wanted to see my father again and kiss him.  To put an end to the agony which my disappearance must have caused him, I would have bartered more than my life, I would have bartered my immortal soul.  Since then, too, as I told you last night, I have renewed my vow, and of my own free-will, moreover; for there was a wall between my amiable fiance and myself.”

“How could you have been so imprudent, Edmee?  Here again I fail to understand you.”

“That I can quite believe, for I do not understand myself,” said Edmee, with a peculiar expression.

“My dear child, you must open your hear to me freely.  I am the only person here who can advise you, since I am the only one to whom you can tell everything under the seal of a friendship as sacred as the secrecy of Catholic confession can be.  Answer me, then.  You do not really look upon a marriage between yourself and Bernard Mauprat as possible?”

“How should that which is inevitable be impossible?” said Edmee.  “There is nothing more possible than throwing one’s self into the river; nothing more possible than surrendering one’s self to misery and despair; nothing more possible, consequently, than marrying Bernard Mauprat.”

“In any case I will not be the one to celebrate such an absurd and deplorable union,” cried the abbe.  “You, the wife and the slave of this Hamstringer!  Edmee, you said just now that you would no more endure the violence of a lover than a husband’s blow.”