unlocked a door, and admitted him into a small but neatly furnished
room.

"Dear Lola," said the priest, as, taking her hand, he looked
affectionately at her,--"I must needs call you by the old name,--what
turn of fortune has brought you here?"

"It is a question well becomes you," said the girl, releasing her
hand from his grasp, and drawing herself proudly up. "You cut the bark
adrift, and you wonder that it has become a wreck!"

"How this old warmth of temper recalls the past, and how I love you for
it, as I grieve over it, Lola; but be calm, and tell me everything, just
as you used to tell me years ago."

"Oh, if I had the same pure heart as then!" cried the girl,
passionately. "Oh, if I could but shed tears, as once I did, over each
slight transgression, and not have my spirit seared and hardened, as the
world has made it!"

"We cannot carry the genial freshness of youth into the ripe years of
judgment, Lola. Gifts decay, and others succeed them."

"No more of this casuistry. _You_ are, I see, the same, whatever changes
time may have made in _me_; but I have outlived these trickeries. Tell
me, frankly, what do you want with me?"

"Must there needs be some motive of self-interest in renewing an old
but interrupted friendship, Lola? You remember what we once were to
each other?"

"Oh that I could forget it!----oh that I could wash out the thought, or
even think it but a dream! But how can you recall these memories? If the
sorrow be mine, is not the shame all yours?"

"The shame and the sorrow are alike mine," said D'Es-monde, in a voice
of deep dejection, "_You_ alone, of all the world, were ever able to
shake within me the great resolves that in prayer and devotion I
had formed. For you, Lola, I was, for a space, willing to resign the
greatest cause that ever man engaged in. Ay, for love of _you_, I was
ready to peril everything--even to my soul! Is not this enough for shame
and sorrow too? Is not this humiliation for one who wears the robe that
I do?"

"You were a student in those days," said Nina, with a sneering smile;
"and I never heard you speak of all those dreadful sacrifices. You used
to talk of leaving the college with a light heart. You spoke of the
world as if you were impatient to mingle with it. You planned I know
not how many roads to fortune and advancement. Among other careers,
I remember"--and here she burst into a scornful laugh, that made the
priest's cheek grow crimson with passion-