or on the night of the great storm by the
Holy Virgin, who posed Herself by the helm. Heavens! yes--it is God who
judges--not priests."

It can be easily understood that with two minds of this breadth, Pere
Anselme and Sabine Howard became real friends.

The Cure, when he read with her the masters of the _dix-septieme_ and
the _dix-huitieme_ had a quaintly humorous expression in his old black
eye.

"Not for girls or for priests--but for _des gens du monde_," he said to
her one day, on putting down a volume of Voltaire.

"Of what matter," Sabine had answered. "Since I am not a girl, _cher
maitre_, and you were once not a priest, and we are both _gens du
monde--hein_?"

His breeding had been of enormous advantage to him, enabling him to
refrain from asking Sabine a single question; but he knew from her
ejaculations as time went on that she had passed through some furnace
during her eighteenth year, and it had seared her deeply. He even knew
more than this; he knew almost as much as Simone, eventually, but it
was all locked in his breast and never even alluded to between them.

Sabine was waiting for him at this moment upon this glorious day in
August. Pere Anselme was going to breakfast with her.

He was announced presently, courtly and spare and distinguished in his
thread-bare soutane, and they went in to the breakfast-room, a round
chamber in the adjoining tower which had kitchens beneath. The walls
were here so thick, that only the sky could be seen from any window
except the southeastern one, from which you reviewed the gray slate
roofs of the later building within the courtyard, the part which had
been always habitable and which contained the salons and the guest
chambers, with only an oblique view of the sea. Here, in Heronac's
mistress' own apartments, the waves eternally encircled the base, and on
rough days rose in great clouds of spray almost to the deep mullions.

"I am having visitors, Pere Anselme," Sabine remarked, when Nicholas,
her fat butler, was handing the omelette. "Madame Imogen is enchanted,"
and she smiled at that lady who had been waiting for dejeuner in the
room before they had entered.

"_Tant mieux!_" responded the priest, with his mouth full of egg and
mushroom. In his youth, the Heronacs had not imported English nurses,
and he ate as his fathers had done before him.

"So much the better. Our lady is too given to solitude, and but for the
meteor-like descents of the Princess Tornil