“Very well, my friend; we shall be with you at four o’clock.”

“Thank you!  You are goodness itself!”

He went away to prepare his canvas and study his subject, so that he need not tire his model too much.

Then the Countess went out alone, on foot, to finish her shopping.  She went down to the great central streets, then walked slowly up the Boulevard Malesherbes, for she felt as if her limbs were breaking.  As she passed Saint Augustin’s, she was seized with a desire to enter the church and rest.  She pushed open the door, sighed with satisfaction in breathing the cool air of the vast nave, took a chair and sat down.

She was religious as very many Parisians are religious.  She believed in God without a doubt, not being able to admit the existence of the universe without the existence of a creator.  But associating, as does everyone, the attributes of divinity with the nature of the created matter that she beheld with her own eyes, she almost personified the Eternal God with what she knew of His work, without having a very clear idea as to what this mysterious Maker might really be.

She believed in Him firmly, adored Him theoretically, feared Him very vaguely, for she did not profess to understand His intentions or His will, having a very limited confidence in the priests, whom she regarded merely as the sons of peasants revolting from military service.  Her father, a middle-class Parisian, never had imposed upon her any particular principles of devotion, and she had lived on thinking little about religious matters until her marriage.  Then, her new station in life indicating more strictly her apparent duties toward the Church, she had conformed punctiliously to this light servitude, as do so many of her station.

She was lady patroness to numerous and very well known infant asylums, never failed to attend mass at one o’clock on Sundays, gave alms for herself directly, and for the world by means of an abbe, the vicar of her parish.

She had often prayed, from a sense of duty, as a soldier mounts guard at a general’s door.  Sometimes she had prayed because her heart was sad, especially when she suspected Olivier of infidelity to her.  At such times, without confiding to Heaven the cause for her appeal, treating God with the same naive hypocrisy that is shown to a husband, she asked Him to succor her.  When her father died, long before, and again quite recently, at her mother’s death, she had had violent crises of religious fervor, and had passionately implored Him who watches over us and consoles us.

And, now behold! to-day, in that church where she had entered by chance, she suddenly felt a profound need to pray, not for some one nor for some thing, but for herself, for herself alone, as she had already prayed the other day at her mother’s grave.  She must have help from some source, and she called on God now as she had summoned the physician that very morning.