ence has come to
change her, as it were in a moment."

"I expect the worst; nothing can surprise me now," said Ursula in a
pained voice. "In such extremities it is a comfort to feel that we have
done nothing to displease God."

"Submit, dear daughter, and do not seek to fathom the ways of
Providence," said the abbe.

"I shall not unjustly distrust the character of Monsieur de
Portenduere--"

"Why do you no longer call him Savinien?" asked the priest, who detected
a slight bitterness in Ursula's tone.

"Of my dear Savinien," cried the girl, bursting into tears. "Yes, my
good friend," she said, sobbing, "a voice tells me he is as noble in
heart as he is in race. He has not only told me that he loves me alone,
but he has proved it in a hundred delicate ways, and by restraining
heroically his ardent feelings. Lately when he took the hand I held out
to him, that evening when Monsieur Bongrand proposed to me a husband, it
was the first time, I swear to you, that I had ever given it. He began
with a jest when he blew me a kiss across the street, but since then our
affection has never outwardly passed, as you well know, the narrowest
limits. But I will tell you,--you who read my soul except in this one
region where none but the angels see,--well, I will tell you, this love
has been in me the secret spring of many seeming merits; it made me
accept my poverty; it softened the bitterness of my irreparable loss,
for my mourning is more perhaps in my clothes now than in my heart--Oh,
was I wrong? can it be that love was stronger in me than my gratitude
to my benefactor, and God has punished me for it? But how could it be
otherwise? I respected in myself Savinien's future wife; yes, perhaps
I was too proud, perhaps it is that pride which God has humbled. God
alone, as you have often told me, should be the end and object of all
our actions."

The abbe was deeply touched as he watched the tears roll down her pallid
face. The higher her sense of security had been, the lower she was now
to fall.

"But," she said, continuing, "if I return to my orphaned condition, I
shall know how to take up its feelings. After all, could I have tied a
mill-stone round the neck of him I love? What can he do here? Who am
I to bind him to me? Besides, do I not love him with a friendship so
divine that I can bear the loss of my own happiness and my hopes? You
know I have often blamed myself for letting my hopes rest upon a grave,
and for knowing th