thought of himself and had
no double meaning.

"I have heard of Saint Aristides for some time," said the bishop,
smiling. "If I have left his light under a bushel I may have been unjust
or prejudiced. Your liberals are always crying up Monsieur Bonnet as
though he belonged to their party. I should like to judge for myself of
this rural apostle. Go at once, messieurs, to Monsieur de Grandville,
and ask for the reprieve; I will await his answer before sending our
dear Abbe Gabriel to Montegnac to fetch the saintly man. We will give
his Blessedness a chance to do miracles."

As he listened to these words of the prelate the Abbe Dutheil reddened;
but he would not allow himself to take notice of the incivilities of the
speech. The two grand vicars bowed in silence and withdrew, leaving the
prelate alone with his secretary.

"The secrets of the confession we are so anxious to obtain from the
unhappy man himself are no doubt buried there," said the bishop to his
young abbe, pointing to the shadow of the poplars where it fell on a
lonely house between the island and Saint-Etienne.

"I have always thought so," replied Gabriel. "I am not a judge and I
will not be an informer; but if I were a magistrate I should have known
the name of that woman who trembles at every sound, at every word, while
forced to keep her features calm and serene under pain of going to the
scaffold with her lover. She has nothing to fear, however. I have seen
the man; he will carry the secret of that passionate love to the grave
with him."

"Ah! you sly fellow!" said the bishop, twisting the ear of his secretary
as he motioned to the space between the island and the suburb
of Saint-Etienne which the last gleams of the setting sun were
illuminating, and on which the young abbe's eyes were fixed. "That is
the place where justice should have searched; don't you think so?"

"I went to see the criminal to try the effect of my suspicions upon
him," replied the young man. "I could not speak them out, for fear of
compromising the woman for whose sake he dies."

"Yes," said the bishop, "we will hold our tongues; we are not the
servants of human justice. One head is enough. Besides, sooner or later,
the secret will be given to the Church."

The perspicacity which the habit of meditation gives to priests is far
superior to that of lawyers or the police. By dint of contemplating from
those terraces the scene of the crime, the prelate and his secretary had
en