ry, and walked with
slow steps along the high-road.

The children would stop their games and run forward to meet him in order to
receive a caress from him, while the young girls whispered together and
seemed to avoid him. The bolder ones met his gaze with a blush: perhaps
they too would have liked, just as the little children, to receive a caress
from the handsome Cure of Althausen. But he passed on without ever
stopping, answering their timid salutations with an almost frigid gravity.

He acted wisely. He was full of distrust of himself, and kept himself in
prudent reserve in face of the enemy. For he knew full well that the enemy
was there, in these sweet woman's eyes and those smiles which wished him
welcome.

Then the pagan intoxications of the Catholic rites were no more surrounding
him to over-excite him and betray the trouble of his heart and the straying
of his thoughts, and if he felt affected before the smiles of these
marriageable girls, he armed himself with force sufficient to thrust back
carefully to his inmost being his boldness and his desires.

It was no more the ardent passionate man who disclosed himself sometimes in
rapid moments of forgetfulness, it was the priest austere and calm, the
functionary salaried by the State to teach the religion of the State.

IV.

EXPECTATION.

"And the days and the hours glided on,
and withdrawn within itself, affected
by sorrows and joys unknown, the soul
stretched its mysterious wing over a
new life soon to dawn."

LAMENNAIS (_Une voix de prison_).

One of his greatest pleasures was to plunge into the woods which surround
the village. He sought silence and solitude there, and when he heard the
steps of a keeper or of some pedestrian, or even the happy voices of young
couples calling one another, he concealed himself behind the masses of
foliage, and hid himself with a kind of shame like a criminal. He wished to
be alone, completely alone, so as to dream at his ease. Then he stretched
himself in the sun on the warm grass, opened his breviary, the discreet
confidant of all wandering thoughts, the screen for the priest's looks and
thoughts, and listened to the insects' hum.

He followed the goings and comings of an ant or the capricious flight of a
bumble-bee; then with his eyes lost in space, immersed in the profundity
of nature, he dreamed....

One could have seen by his smile that he was wandering in spirit in the
laughing and limit