“Do you hold me in horror?” he repeated.

Her lips contracted as if she smiled. “Go to,” said she, “the executioner taunts the condemned! For months he has pursued me, threatened me, terrified me! But for him, my God, how happy I was! It is he who has cast me into this pit! Oh, heavens! it is he who has killed— it is he who has murdered him— my Phœbus!”

Here, bursting into tears, she lifted her eyes to the priest. “Oh, wretch! who are you?— what have I done to you that you should hate me so? Alas! what have you against me?”

“I love thee!” cried the priest.

Her tears ceased suddenly. She regarded him with an idiotic stare. He had sunk on his knees before her and enveloped her in a gaze of flame.

“Dost thou hear? I love thee!” he cried again.

“What love is that!” she shuddered.

“The love of the damned!” he answered.

Both remained silent for some minutes, crushed under the load of their emotion— he distraught, she stupefied.

“Listen,” the priest began at last, and a strange calm had come over him; “thou shalt know all. I am going to tell thee what have hitherto scarcely dared to say to myself when I furtively searched my conscience in those deep hours of the night, when it seems so dark that God himself can see us no longer. Listen. Before I saw thee, girl, I was happy.”

“And I,” she faintly murmured.

“Do not interrupt me— Yes, I was happy, or at least judged myself to be so. I was pure— my soul was filled with limpid light. No head was lifted so high, so radiantly as mine. Priests consulted me upon chastity, ecclesiastics upon doctrine. Yes, learning was all in all to me— it was a sister, and a sister sufficed me. Not but what, in time, other thoughts came to me. More than once my flesh stirred at the passing of some female form. The power of sex and of a man’s blood that, foolish adolescent, I had thought stifled forever, had more than once shaken convulsively the iron chain of the vows that rivet me, hapless wretch, to the cold stones of the altar. But fasting, prayer, study, the mortifications of the cloister again restored the empire of the soul over the body. Also I strenuously avoided women. Besides, I had but to open a book, and all the impure vapours of my brain were dissipated by the splendid beams of learning; the gross things of this earth fled from before me, and I found myself once more calm, serene, and joyous in the presence of the steady radiance of eternal truth. So long as the foul fiend only sent against me indefinite shadows of women passing here and there before my eyes, in the church, in the streets, in the fields, and which scarce returned to me in my dreams, I vanquished him easily. Alas! if it stayed not with me, the fault lies with God, who made not man and the demon of equal strength. Listen. One day— ”

Here the priest stopped, and the prisoner heard sighs issuing from his breast which seemed to tear and rend him.

He resumed. “One day I was leaning at the window of my cell. What book was I reading? Oh, all is confusion in my mind— I was reading. The window overlooked an open square. I heard a sound of a tambourine and of music. Vexed at being thus disturbed in my meditation, I looked into the square. What I saw, there were others who saw it too, and yet it was no spectacle meet for mortal eyes. There, in the middle of the open space— it was noon— a burning sun — a girl was dancing— but a creature