dared give no more."

He paused, and drew forth from the breast of his soutane a small cotton
sack that had once held his gun wads. "Here is what is left, gentlemen,"
said he, facing the Municipal Council; "I have counted it at last, four
hundred and eighty francs, sixty-five centimes."

There were tears now in Alice's eyes; dark eyes that followed the cure's
with a look of tenderness and pain. The mayor sat breathing irritably.
As for the Municipal Council, it was evident to Tanrade and myself, that
not one of these plain, red-eared citizens was eager to send a priest to
jail--it was their custom occasionally to go to mass.

"Marianne's illness," continued the cure, "was an important item. You
seemed to consider her case of typhoid as a malady that would cure
itself if let alone. Marianne needed care, serious care, strong as she
was. The girl, Yvonne, she saved from drowning last year, and her baby,
she still shelters among her own children in her hut. They, too, had to
be fed; for Marianne was helpless to care for them. There was the little
boy, too, of the Gavons--left alone, with a case of measles well
developed when I found him, on the draughty floor of a loft; the mother
and father had been drunk together for three days at Bar la Rose. And
there were others--the Mere Gailliard, who would have been sold out for
her rent, and poor old Varnet, the fisherman; he had no home, no money,
no friends; he is eighty-four years old. Most of the winter he slept in
a hedge under a cast-off sail. I got him a better roof and something for
his stomach, Monsieur le Maire."

He paused again, and drew out a folded paper from his pocket. "Here is a
list of all I can remember I have given to, and the amounts as near as I
can recall them," he declared simply. Again he turned to Alice. "It is
to you, dear friend, I have come to confess," he continued; "as for you,
gentlemen, my very life, the church I love, all that this village means
to me, lies in your hands; I do not beg your mercy. I have sinned and I
shall take the consequences--all I ask you to do is to judge fairly the
error of my ways." Monsieur le Cure took his seat.

"It is for you, Madame de Breville, to decide," said the mayor, after
some moments conference with the Council, "since the amount in question
was given by your hand."

Alice rose--softly she slipped past the Municipal Council of Pont du
Sable, until she stood looking up into the cure's eyes; then her arms
w