e were
the verdant lawns, the rippling brook, the little chamber, the scenes
of her happy play. She saw herself gathering flowers and planting them,
unknowing why they wilted and would not grow, despite her constancy in
watering them. Next, she saw confusedly the vast town and the vast house
blackened by age, to which her mother took her when she was seven years
old. Her lively memory showed her the old gray heads of the masters who
taught and tormented her. She remembered the person of her father; she
saw him getting off his mule at the door of the manor-house, and taking
her by the hand to lead her up the stairs; she recalled how her prattle
drove from his brow the judicial cares he did not always lay aside
with his black or his red robes, the white fur of which fell one day by
chance under the snipping of her mischievous scissors. She cast but one
glance at the confessor of her aunt, the mother-superior of a convent
of Poor Clares, a rigid and fanatical old man, whose duty it was to
initiate her into the mysteries of religion. Hardened by the severities
necessary against heretics, the old priest never ceased to jangle the
chains of hell; he told her of nothing but the vengeance of Heaven, and
made her tremble with the assurance that God's eye was on her. Rendered
timid, she dared not raise her eyes in the priest's presence, and ceased
to have any feeling but respect for her mother, whom up to that time she
had made a sharer in all her frolics. When she saw that beloved mother
turning her blue eyes towards her with an appearance of anger, a
religious terror took possession of the girl's heart.

Then suddenly the vision took her to the second period of her childhood,
when as yet she understood nothing of the things of life. She thought
with an almost mocking regret of the days when all her happiness was to
work beside her mother in the tapestried salon, to pray in the church,
to sing her ballads to a lute, to read in secret a romance of chivalry,
to pluck the petals of a flower, discover what gift her father would
make her on the feast of the Blessed Saint-John, and find out the
meaning of speeches repressed before her. Passing thus from her childish
joys through the sixteen years of her girlhood, the grace of those
softly flowing years when she knew no pain was eclipsed by the
brightness of a memory precious though ill-fated. The joyous peace
of her childhood was far less sweet to her than a single one of the
troubles