gelique passed more and more time in the
morning and evening with her elbows on the balustrade of the balcony,
side by side with her great friend, the Cathedral. She loved it the best
at night, when she saw the enormous mass detach itself like a huge block
on the starry skies. The form of the building was lost. It was with
difficulty that she could even distinguish the flying buttresses, which
were thrown like bridges into the empty space. It was, nevertheless,
awake in the darkness, filled with a dream of seven centuries, made
grand by the multitudes who had hoped or despaired before its altars.
It was a continual watch, coming from the infinite of the past, going to
the eternity of the future; the mysterious and terrifying wakefulness
of a house where God Himself never sleeps. And in the dark, motionless,
living mass, her looks were sure to seek the window of a chapel of the
choir, on the level of the bushes of the Clos-Marie, the only one which
was lighted up, and which seemed like an eye which was kept open all
the night. Behind it, at the corner of a pillar, was an ever-burning
altar-lamp. In fact, it was the same chapel which the abbots of old had
given to Jean V d'Hautecoeur, and to his descendants, with the right of
being buried there, in return for their liberality. Dedicated to Saint
George, it had a stained-glass window of the twelfth century, on which
was painted the legend of the saint. From the moment of the coming on of
twilight, this historic representation came out from the shade,
lighted up as if it were an apparition, and that was why Angelique was
fascinated, and loved this particular point, as she gazed at it with her
dreamy eyes.

The background of the window was blue and the edges red. Upon this
sombre richness of colouring, the personages, whose flying draperies
allowed their limbs to be seen, stood out in relief in clear light
on the glass. Three scenes of the Legend, placed one above the other,
filled the space quite to the upper arch. At the bottom, the daughter of
the king, dressed in costly royal robes, on her way from the city to be
eaten by the dreadful monster, meets Saint George near the pond, from
which the head of the dragon already appears; and a streamer of silk
bears these words: "Good Knight, do not run any danger for me, as you
can neither help me nor deliver me, but will have to perish with me."
Then in the middle the combat takes place, and the saint, on horseback,
cuts the beas