er found it difficult to recognise her. Her fair,
prematurely faded face was radiant, she seemed to be ten years younger,
suddenly aroused from the infinite sadness into which desertion had
plunged her. And, at last, her joy overflowing, she raised a cry: "I am
going off with him! Yes, he has come to fetch me, he is taking me with
him. Yes, yes, we are going to Luchon together, together!"

Then, with a rapturous glance, she pointed out a dark, sturdy-looking
young man, with gay eyes and bright red lips, who was purchasing some
newspapers. "There! that's my husband," said she, "that handsome man
who's laughing over there with the newspaper-girl. He turned up here
early this morning, and he's carrying me off. We shall take the Toulouse
train in a couple of minutes. Ah! dear madame, I told you of all my
worries, and you can understand my happiness, can't you?"

However, she could not remain silent, but again spoke of the frightful
letter which she had received on Sunday, a letter in which he had
declared to her that if she should take advantage of her sojourn at
Lourdes to come to Luchon after him, he would not open the door to her.
And, think of it, theirs had been a love match! But for ten years he had
neglected her, profiting by his continual journeys as a commercial
traveller to take friends about with him from one to the other end of
France. Ah! that time she had thought it all over, she had asked the
Blessed Virgin to let her die, for she knew that the faithless one was at
that very moment at Luchon with two friends. What was it then that had
happened? A thunderbolt must certainly have fallen from heaven. Those two
friends must have received a warning from on high--perhaps they had
dreamt that they were already condemned to everlasting punishment. At all
events they had fled one evening without a word of explanation, and he,
unable to live alone, had suddenly been seized with a desire to fetch his
wife and keep her with him for a week. Grace must have certainly fallen
on him, though he did not say it, for he was so kind and pleasant that
she could not do otherwise than believe in a real beginning of
conversion.

"Ah! how grateful I am to the Blessed Virgin," she continued; "she alone
can have acted, and I well understood her last evening. It seemed to me
that she made me a little sign just at the very moment when my husband
was making up his mind to come here to fetch me. I asked him at what time
it was that the id