t of terror! and how quickly she died! I have taken the room for
my own. But I shall not remain here long. I intend to go for a few
days to Varaville. I want to see my little girl: her dear angel's face.

VALMOUTIERS, April 22.--What a change there has been in the world since
my childhood: since my youth even! what a surprising change in so short
a period, in the moral atmosphere we are breathing! Then we were, as it
were, impregnated with the thought of God--a just God, but benevolent
and fatherlike. We really lived under His eyes, as under the eyes of a
parent, with respect and fear, but with confidence. We felt sustained
by His invisible but undoubted presence. We spoke to Him, and it
seemed that He answered. And now we feel ourselves alone--as it were
abandoned in the immensity of the universe. We live in a world, hard,
savage, full of hatred; whose one cruel law is the struggle for
existence, and in which we are no more than those natural elements, let
loose to war with each other in fierce selfishness, without pity, with
no appeal beyond, no hope of final justice. And above us, in place of
the good God of our happy youth, nothing, any more! or worse than
nothing--a deity, barbarous and ironical, who cares nothing at all
about us.

The aged mother of Aliette, hitherto the guardian of his daughter, is
lately dead. Bernard proposes to take the child away with him to
Paris. The child's old nurse objects. On April the twenty-seventh,
Bernard writes:

For a moment--for a few moments--in that room where I have been
shutting myself up with the shadow of my poor [236] dead one, a
horrible thought had come to me. I had driven it away as an insane
fancy. But now, yes! it is becoming a reality. Shall I write this?
Yes! I will write it. It is my duty to do so; for from this moment
the journal, begun in so much gaiety of heart, is but my last will and
testament. If I should disappear from the world, the secret must not
die with me. It must be bequeathed to the natural protectors of my
child. Her interests, if not her life, are concerned therein.

Here, then, is what passed: I had not arrived in time to render my last
duty to Madame de Courteheuse. The family was already dispersed. I
found here only Aliette's brother. To him I communicated my plan
concerning the child, and he could but approve. My intention was to
bring away with Jeanne her nurse Victoire, who had brought her up, as
she brought up he