re than the indulgence of melancholy
thoughts."

Veronique pressed the rector's hand, answering with four brief words,
but they were grand ones:--

"It shall be done."

"You conceive the possibility of this great work," he went on; "but you
cannot execute it. Neither you nor I have the necessary knowledge to
accomplish an idea which might have come to all, but the execution of
which presents immense difficulties; for simple as it may seem, the
matter requires the most accurate science with all its resources. Seek,
therefore, at once for the proper human instruments who will enable you
within the next dozen years to get an income of six or seven thousand
louis out of the six thousand acres you irrigate and fertilize. Such an
enterprise will make Montegnac at some future day the most prosperous
district in the department. The forest, as yet, yields you no return,
but sooner or later commerce will come here in search of its fine
woods--those treasures amassed by time; the only ones the production of
which cannot be hastened or improved upon by man. The State may some day
provide a way of transport from this forest, for many of the trees would
make fine masts for the navy; but it will wait until the increasing
population of Montegnac makes a demand upon its protection; for the
State is like fortune, it comes only to the rich. This estate, well
managed, will become, in the course of time, one of the finest in
France; it will be the pride of your grandson, who may then find the
chateau paltry, comparing it with its revenues."

"Here," said Veronique, "is a future for my life."

"A beneficent work such as that will redeem wrongdoing," said the
rector.

Seeing that she understood him, he attempted to strike another blow on
this woman's intellect, judging rightly that in her the intellect
led the heart, whereas in other women the heart is their road to
intelligence.

"Do you know," he said after a pause, "the error in which you are
living?"

She looked at him timidly.

"Your repentance is as yet only a sense of defeat endured,--which
is horrible, for it is nothing else than the despair of Satan; such,
perhaps, was the repentance of mankind before the coming of Jesus
Christ. But our repentance, the repentance of Christians, is the horror
of a soul struck down on an evil path, to whom, by this very shock,
God has revealed Himself. You are like the pagan Orestes; make yourself
another Paul."

"Your words have changed