lle say Mass, then, as the priest was leaving the sacristy, he
went up to him and asked to be heard for a moment.

They descended the steps of the church together and in the bright
morning light walked round the fountain of the _Quatre Eveques_. In
spite of his troubled conscience and the difficulty of presenting so
extraordinary a case with any degree of credibility, Maurice related how
the angel Arcade had appeared to him and had announced his unhappy
resolve to separate from him and to stir up a new revolt of the spirits
of glory. And young d'Esparvieu asked the worthy ecclesiastic how to
find his celestial guardian again, since he could not bear his absence,
and how to lead his angel back to the Christian faith. Abbe Patouille
replied in a tone of affectionate sorrow that his dear child had been
dreaming, that he took a morbid hallucination for reality, and that it
was not permissible to believe that good angels may revolt.

"People have a notion," he added, "that they can lead a life of
dissipation and disorder with impunity. They are wrong. The abuse of
pleasure corrupts the intelligence and impairs the understanding. The
devil takes possession of the sinner's senses, penetrating even to his
soul. He has deceived you, Maurice, by a clumsy artifice."

Maurice objected that he was not in any way a victim of hallucinations,
that he had not been dreaming, that he had seen his guardian angel with
his eyes and heard him with his ears.

"Monsieur l'Abbe," he insisted, "a lady who happened to be with me at
the time,--I need not mention her name,--also saw and heard him. And,
moreover, she felt the angel's fingers straying ... well, anyhow, she
felt them.... Believe me, Monsieur l'Abbe, nothing could be more real,
more positively certain than this apparition. The angel was fair, young,
very handsome. His clear skin seemed, in the shadow, as if bathed in
milky light. He spoke in a pure, sweet voice."

"That, alone, my child," the Abbe interrupted quickly, "proves you were
dreaming. According to all the demonologies, bad angels have a hoarse
voice, which grates like a rusty lock, and even if they did contrive to
give a certain look of beauty to their faces, they cannot succeed in
imitating the pure voice of the good spirits. This fact, attested by
numerous witnesses, is established beyond all doubt."

"But, Monsieur l'Abbe, I saw him. I saw him sit down, stark naked, in an
arm-chair on a pair of black stockings. What el