Stay by me!"

"Of course I am hard," she went on. "Whenever we give pain we are hard.
And we MUST give pain; that's the world,--the hateful, miserable world!
Ah!" and she gave a long, deep sigh, "I can't even say I am glad to have
known you--though I am. That too is to wrong you. I can say nothing that
is not cruel. Therefore let us part, without more of this. Good-by!" And
she put out her hand.

Newman stood and looked at it without taking it, and raised his eyes to
her face. He felt, himself, like shedding tears of rage. "What are you
going to do?" he asked. "Where are you going?"

"Where I shall give no more pain and suspect no more evil. I am going
out of the world."

"Out of the world?"

"I am going into a convent."

"Into a convent!" Newman repeated the words with the deepest dismay;
it was as if she had said she was going into an hospital. "Into a
convent--YOU!"

"I told you that it was not for my worldly advantage or pleasure I was
leaving you."

But still Newman hardly understood. "You are going to be a nun," he went
on, "in a cell--for life--with a gown and white veil?"

"A nun--a Carmelite nun," said Madame de Cintre. "For life, with God's
leave."

The idea struck Newman as too dark and horrible for belief, and made
him feel as he would have done if she had told him that she was going
to mutilate her beautiful face, or drink some potion that would make her
mad. He clasped his hands and began to tremble, visibly.

"Madame de Cintre, don't, don't!" he said. "I beseech you! On my knees,
if you like, I'll beseech you."

She laid her hand upon his arm, with a tender, pitying, almost
reassuring gesture. "You don't understand," she said. "You have wrong
ideas. It's nothing horrible. It is only peace and safety. It is to be
out of the world, where such troubles as this come to the innocent,
to the best. And for life--that's the blessing of it! They can't begin
again."

Newman dropped into a chair and sat looking at her with a long,
inarticulate murmur. That this superb woman, in whom he had seen all
human grace and household force, should turn from him and all the
brightness that he offered her--him and his future and his fortune and
his fidelity--to muffle herself in ascetic rags and entomb herself in a
cell was a confounding combination of the inexorable and the grotesque.
As the image deepened before him the grotesque seemed to expand and
overspread it; it was a reduction to the absurd of the tr