those on whose discretion reliance could be placed. MM. Grossetete, de
Grandville, Roubaud, Gerard, Clousier, Ruffin, took the first places.
They had arranged among themselves that they should rise and stand in a
group, thus preventing the words of the repentant woman from being heard
in the farther rooms; but their tears and sobs would, in any case, have
drowned her voice.

At this moment and before all else in that audience, two persons
presented, to an observer, a powerfully affecting sight. One was
Denise Tascheron. Her foreign garments, of Quaker simplicity, made her
unrecognizable by her former village acquaintance. The other was
quite another personage, an acquaintance not to be forgotten, and
his apparition there was like a streak of lurid light. The
_procureur-general_ came suddenly to a perception of the truth; the
part that he had played to Madame Graslin unrolled itself before him;
he divined it to its fullest extent. Less influenced, as a son of the
nineteenth century, by the religious aspect of the matter, Monsieur de
Grandville's heart was filled with an awful dread; for he saw before
him, he contemplated the drama of that woman's hidden self at the hotel
Graslin during the trial of Jean-Francois Tascheron. That tragic period
came back distinctly to his memory,--lighted even now by the mother's
eyes, shining with hatred, which fell upon him where he stood, like
drops of molten lead. That old woman, standing ten feet from him,
forgave nothing. That man, representing human justice, trembled. Pale,
struck to the heart, he dared not cast his eyes upon the bed where lay
the woman he had loved so well, now livid beneath the hand of death,
gathering strength to conquer agony from the greatness of her sin and
its repentance. The mere sight of Veronique's thin profile, sharply
defined in white upon the crimson damask, caused him a vertigo.

At eleven o'clock the mass began. After the epistle had been read by the
rector of Vizay the archbishop removed his dalmatic and advanced to the
threshold of the bedroom door.

"Christians, gather here to assist in the ceremony of extreme unction
which we are about to administer to the mistress of this house," he
said, "you who join your prayers to those of the Church and intercede
with God to obtain from Him her eternal salvation, you are now to
learn that she does not feel herself worthy, in this, her last hour, to
receive the holy viaticum without having made, for the ed