ursue with Ursula about his discovery of this
dawning passion. To question her now would commit him to some course.
He must either approve or disapprove of her love; in either case his
position would be a false one. He therefore resolved to watch and
examine into the state of things between the two young people, and
learn whether it were his duty to check the inclination before it was
irresistible. None but an old man could have shown such deliberate
wisdom. Still panting from the discovery of the truth of these magnetic
facts, he turned about and looked at all the various little things
around the room; he wished to examine the almanac which was hanging at a
corner of the chimney-piece.

"These ugly things are too heavy for your little hands," he said, taking
up the marble candlesticks which were partly covered with leather.

He weighed them in his hand; then he looked at the almanac and took it,
saying, "This is ugly too. Why do you keep such a common thing in your
pretty room?"

"Oh, please let me have it, godfather."

"No, no, you shall have another to-morrow."

So saying he carried off this possible proof, shut himself up in his
study, looked for Saint Savinien and found, as the somnambulist had told
him, a little red dot at the 19th of October; he also saw another before
his own saint's day, Saint Denis, and a third before Saint John, the
abbe's patron. This little dot, no larger than a pin's head, had been
seen by the sleeping woman in spite of distance and other obstacles!
The old man thought till evening of these events, more momentous for him
than for others. He was forced to yield to evidence. A strong wall,
as it were, crumbled within him; for his life had rested on two
bases,--indifference in matters of religion and a firm disbelief in
magnetism. When it was proved to him that the senses--faculties purely
physical, organs, the effects of which could be explained--attained to
some of the attributes of the infinite, magnetism upset, or at least it
seemed to him to upset, the powerful arguments of Spinoza. The finite
and the infinite, two incompatible elements according to that remarkable
man, were here united, the one in the other. No matter what power
he gave to the divisibility and mobility of matter he could not help
recognizing that it possessed qualities that were almost divine.

He was too old now to connect those phenomena to a system, and compare
them with those of sleep, of vision, of light. His