Some years after Justine Marie’s death, ruin had come on her house too. Her father, by nominal calling a jeweller, but who also dealt a good deal on the Bourse, had been concerned in some financial transactions which entailed exposure and ruinous fines. He died of grief for the loss and shame for the infamy. His old hunchbacked mother and his bereaved wife were left penniless, and might have died, too, of want; but their lost daughter’s once-despised yet most true-hearted suitor, hearing of the condition of these ladies, came with singular devotedness to the rescue. He took on their insolent pride the revenge of the purest charity—housing, caring for, befriending them, so as no son could have done it more tenderly and efficiently. The mother—on the whole, a good woman—died blessing him. The strange, godless, loveless, misanthrope grandmother lived still, entirely supported by this self-sacrificing man. Her, who had been the bane of his life, blighting his hope, and awarding him, for love and domestic happiness, long mourning and cheerless solitude, he treated with the respect a good son might offer a kind mother. He had brought her to this house, “and,” continued the priest, while genuine tears rose to his eyes, “here, too, he shelters me, his old tutor, and Agnes, a superannuated servant of his father’s family. To our sustenance and to other charities I know he devotes three parts of his income, keeping only the fourth to provide himself with bread and the most modest accommodations. By this arrangement he has rendered it impossible to himself ever to marry. He has given himself to God and to his angel-bride as much as if he were a priest, like me.”

The father had wiped away his tears before he uttered these last words, and in pronouncing them he for one instant raised his eyes to mine. I caught this glance, despite its veiled character. The momentary gleam shot a meaning which struck me.

These Romanists are strange beings. Such a one among them—whom you know no more than the last Inca of Peru or the first Emperor of China—knows you and all your concerns, and has his reasons for saying to you so and so, when you simply thought the communication sprang impromptu from the instant’s impulse, his plan in bringing it about that you shall come on such a day, to such a place, under such and such circumstances, when the whole arrangement seems to your crude apprehension the ordinance of chance or the sequel of exigency. Madame Beck’s suddenly recollected message and present, my artless embassy to the Place of the Magi, the old priest accidentally descending the steps and crossing the square, his interposition on my behalf with the bonne who would have sent me away, his reappearance on the staircase, my introduction to this room, the portrait, the narrative so affably volunteered—all these little incidents, taken as they fell out, seemed each independent of its successor—a handful of loose beads. But threaded through by that quick-shot and crafty glance of a Jesuit eye, they dropped pendant in a long string, like that rosary on the prie-dieu. Where lay the link of junction, where the little clasp of this monastic necklace? I saw or felt union, but could not yet find the spot or detect the means of connection.

Perhaps the musing-fit into which I had by this time fallen appeared somewhat suspicious in its abstraction. He gently interrupted.

“Mademoiselle,” said he, “I trust you have not far to go through these inundated streets?”

“More than half a league.”

“You live——”

“In the Rue Fossette.”

“Not” (with animation), “not at the pensionnat of Madame Beck?”

“The same.”

“Donc” (clapping his hands), “donc, vous devez connaître mon noble élève, mon Paul?”

“Monsieur Paul Emanuel, professor of literature?”