ld never forget him. Years went by, and they found themselves
forever parted: he a priest, she prostrated by illness, no longer with
any hope of ever being a woman. That was their whole story--an ardent
affection of which they had long been ignorant, then absolute severance,
as though they were dead, albeit they lived side by side. They again
beheld the sorry lodging whence they had started to come to Lourdes after
so much battling, so much discussion--his doubts and her passionate
faith, which last had conquered. And it seemed to them truly delightful
to find themselves once more quite alone together, in that dark nook on
that lovely night, when there were as many stars upon earth as there were
in heaven.

Marie had hitherto retained the soul of a child, a spotless soul, as her
father said, good and pure among the purest. Stricken low in her
thirteenth year, she had grown no older in mind. Although she was now
three-and-twenty, she was still a child, a child of thirteen, who had
retired within herself, absorbed in the bitter catastrophe which had
annihilated her. You could tell this by the frigidity of her glance, by
her absent expression, by the haunted air she ever wore, unable as she
was to bestow a thought on anything but her calamity. And never was
woman's soul more pure and candid, arrested as it had been in its
development. She had had no other romance in life save that tearful
farewell to her friend, which for ten long years had sufficed to fill her
heart. During the endless days which she had spent on her couch of
wretchedness, she had never gone beyond this dream--that if she had grown
up in health, he doubtless would not have become a priest, in order to
live near her. She never read any novels. The pious works which she was
allowed to peruse maintained her in the excitement of a superhuman love.
Even the rumours of everyday life died away at the door of the room where
she lived in seclusion; and, in past years, when she had been taken from
one to the other end of France, from one inland spa to another, she had
passed through the crowds like a somnambulist who neither sees nor hears
anything, possessed, as she was, by the idea of the calamity that had
befallen her, the bond which made her a sexless thing. Hence her purity
and childishness; hence she was but an adorable daughter of suffering,
who, despite the growth of her sorry flesh, harboured nothing in her
heart save that distant awakening of passion, the