should take you with me."

Then, seeing Durtal's amazement, he smiled. "But I will not leave you
there," he went on, "unless you wish not to return to Chartres. I only
propose that you should pay a visit there, just long enough to breathe
the atmosphere of the convent, to make acquaintance with the Benedictine
Fathers, and try their life."

Durtal was silent, somewhat scared; for this proposal, simple enough as
it was, that he should go to live for some days in a cloister, had
startled him into a strange, a grotesque notion that if he should
accept, it would be playing away his last card, risking a decisive step,
taking a sort of pledge before God to settle there and end his days in
His immediate presence.

But what was most strange was that this idea, so imperative and
overpowering that it excluded all possible reflection, bereft him of all
his powers of self-protection, left him disarmed at the mercy of he knew
not what--this idea, which nothing justified, was not centred, not fixed
on Solesmes; whither he should retreat was for the moment of small
importance; that was not the question; the only point to settle was
whether he meant to yield at all to a vague impulse, to obey
unformulated orders which were nevertheless positive, and give an
earnest to God, Who seemed to be harassing him without any sufficient
explanation.

He felt himself inexorably condemned, tacitly compelled to pronounce his
decision then and there.

He tried to struggle, to reason, to recover his self-possession; but the
very effort was fatal. He felt a sort of inward syncope, as though,
while his body was still upright, his soul was fainting within him with
fatigue and terror.

"But this is madness!" he cried. "Madness!"

"Why, what is the matter?" cried the two priests.

"I beg your pardon. Nothing."

"Are you in pain?"

"No, it is nothing."

There was an awkward pause which he was determined to break.

"Did you ever take laughing gas?" said he; "the gas which sends you to
sleep and is used in surgery for short operations? No? Well, you feel a
buzzing in your brain, and just as you hear a great noise of falling
waters you lose consciousness. That is what I am feeling; only the
experience is not in my brain, but in my soul, which is giddy and
helpless, on the point of fainting away."

"I should like to think," said the Abbe Plomb, "that it is not the
thought of a visit to Solesmes that has thus upset you."

Durtal had not coura