ul nor the senses, addresses the mind only by its creations of pure
fantasy.

Thus--singular to say!--the life which the hatred of a father had
imposed on Etienne d'Herouville, paternal love had induced Beauvouloir
to impose on Gabrielle. In both these children the soul was killing the
body; and without an absolute solitude, ordained by cruelty for one and
procured by science for the other, each was likely to succumb,--he to
terror, she beneath the weight of a too keen emotion of love. But, alas!
instead of being born in a region of gorse and moor, in the midst of an
arid nature of hard and angular shapes, such as all great painters have
given as backgrounds to their Virgins, Gabrielle lived in a rich and
fertile valley. Beauvouloir could not destroy the harmonious grouping of
the native woods, the graceful upspringing of the wild flowers, the cool
softness of the grassy slopes, the love expressed in the intertwining
growth of the clustering plants. Such ever-living poesies have a
language heard, rather than understood by the poor girl, who yielded to
vague misery among the shadows. Across the misty ideas suggested by
her long study of this beautiful landscape, observed at all seasons and
through all the variations of a marine atmosphere in which the fogs
of England come to die and the sunshine of France is born, there rose
within her soul a distant light, a dawn which pierced the darkness in
which her father kept her.

Beauvouloir had never withdrawn his daughter from the influence of
Divine love; to a deep admiration of nature she joined her girlish
adoration of the Creator, springing thus into the first way open to the
feelings of womanhood. She loved God, she loved Jesus, the Virgin and
the saints; she loved the Church and its pomps; she was Catholic after
the manner of Saint Teresa, who saw in Jesus an eternal spouse, a
continual marriage. Gabrielle gave herself up to this passion of strong
souls with so touching a simplicity that she would have disarmed the
most brutal seducer by the infantine naivete of her language.

Whither was this life of innocence leading Gabrielle? How teach a mind
as pure as the water of a tranquil lake, reflecting only the azure of
the skies? What images should be drawn upon that spotless canvas? Around
which tree must the tendrils of this bind-weed twine? No father has ever
put these questions to himself without an inward shudder.

At this moment the good old man of science was riding