ople talking in their
sleep; they always frightened her. And Mrs. Tristram intimated that,
taking very high ground as regards the moral obligation which events
had laid upon her, she proposed not to rest quiet until she should have
confronted him with the least inadequate substitute for Madame de Cintre
that the two hemispheres contained.

"Oh," said Newman, "we are even now, and we had better not open a new
account! You may bury me some day, but you shall never marry me. It's
too rough. I hope, at any rate," he added, "that there is nothing
incoherent in this--that I want to go next Sunday to the Carmelite
chapel in the Avenue de Messine. You know one of the Catholic
ministers--an abbe, is that it?--I have seen him here, you know; that
motherly old gentleman with the big waist-band. Please ask him if I need
a special leave to go in, and if I do, beg him to obtain it for me."

Mrs. Tristram gave expression to the liveliest joy. "I am so glad you
have asked me to do something!" she cried. "You shall get into the
chapel if the abbe is disfrocked for his share in it." And two days
afterwards she told him that it was all arranged; the abbe was enchanted
to serve him, and if he would present himself civilly at the convent
gate there would be no difficulty.

CHAPTER XXIV

Sunday was as yet two days off; but meanwhile, to beguile his
impatience, Newman took his way to the Avenue de Messine and got
what comfort he could in staring at the blank outer wall of Madame de
Cintre's present residence. The street in question, as some travelers
will remember, adjoins the Parc Monceau, which is one of the prettiest
corners of Paris. The quarter has an air of modern opulence and
convenience which seems at variance with the ascetic institution,
and the impression made upon Newman's gloomily-irritated gaze by the
fresh-looking, windowless expanse behind which the woman he loved was
perhaps even then pledging herself to pass the rest of her days was less
exasperating than he had feared. The place suggested a convent with the
modern improvements--an asylum in which privacy, though unbroken,
might be not quite identical with privation, and meditation, though
monotonous, might be of a cheerful cast. And yet he knew the case was
otherwise; only at present it was not a reality to him. It was too
strange and too mocking to be real; it was like a page torn out of a
romance, with no context in his own experience.

On Sunday morning, at t