rave, showing the stigmata on hands and feet and the pierced
side; now a nun, beautiful as the veiled figures in the Church
pictures, expiating in the fires of hell mysterious sins. Jean
had _his_ favourite tale. Shuddering, he would relate how St.
Francis Borgia, after the death of Queen Isabella, who was lovely
beyond compare, must have the coffin opened wherein she lay at rest
in her robe embroidered with pearls; in imagination he pictured
the dead Queen, invested her form with all the magic hues of the
unknown, traced in her lineaments the enchantments of a woman's
beauty in the dark gulf of death. And as he told the tale, he could
hear, in the twilight gloom, a murmur of soft voices sighing in
the plane trees of the Luxembourg.

The great day arrived. The bookbinder, who attended the ceremony
with his sister, thought of his wife and wept.

He was most favourably impressed by the _cure's_ homily, in which
a young man without faith was compared to an unbridled charger
that plunges over precipices. The simile struck his fancy, and
he would quote it years after with approbation. He made up his
mind to read the Bible, as he had read Voltaire, "to get the
hang of things."

Jean withdrew from the houselling cloth, wondering to be just
the same as ever and already disillusioned. He was never again
to recover the first fervent rapture.

VII

The holidays were near. An noon of a blazing hot day Jean was
seated in the shade on the dwarf-wall that bounded the school
count towards the headmaster's garden, He was playing languidly
at shovel-board with a schoolfellow, a lad as pretty as a girl
with his curls and his jacket of white duck.

"Ewans," said Jean, as he pushed a pebble along one of the lines
drawn in charcoal on the stone coping, "Ewans, you must find
it tiresome to be a boarder?"

"Mother cannot have me with her at home," replied the boy.

Servien asked why.

"Oh! Because----" stammered Ewans.

He stared a long time at the white pebble he held in his hand
ready to play, before he added:

"My mother goes travelling."

"And your father?"

"He is in America. I have never seen him. You've lost. Let's begin
again."

Servien, who felt interested in Madame Ewans because of the superb
boxes of chocolates she used to bring to school for her boy,
put another question:

"You love her very much, your mother I mean?"

"Of course I do!" cried the other, adding presently:

"You must come and see me on