k, finding the executioner
in the deliverer again.

"At any rate, you must give up seeing him," he went on. "I will take
you to a religious house where young girls of the best families are
educated; there you will become a Catholic, you will be trained in the
practice of Christian exercises, you will be taught religion. You may
come out an accomplished young lady, chaste, pure, well brought up,
if----" The man lifted up a finger and paused.

"If," he went on, "you feel brave enough to leave the 'Torpille' behind
you here."

"Ah!" cried the poor thing, to whom each word had been like a note of
some melody to which the gates of Paradise were slowly opening. "Ah! if
it were possible to shed all my blood here and have it renewed!"

"Listen to me."

She was silent.

"Your future fate depends on your power of forgetting. Think of the
extent to which you pledge yourself. A word, a gesture, which betrays
La Torpille will kill Lucien's wife. A word murmured in a dream, an
involuntary thought, an immodest glance, a gesture of impatience, a
reminiscence of dissipation, an omission, a shake of the head that might
reveal what you know, or what is known about you for your woes----"

"Yes, yes, Father," said the girl, with the exaltation of a saint. "To
walk in shoes of red-hot iron and smile, to live in a pair of stays set
with nails and maintain the grace of a dancer, to eat bread salted with
ashes, to drink wormwood,--all will be sweet and easy!"

She fell again on her knees, she kissed the priest's shoes, she melted
into tears that wetted them, she clasped his knees, and clung to them,
murmuring foolish words as she wept for joy. Her long and beautiful
light hair waved to the ground, a sort of carpet under the feet of the
celestial messenger, whom she saw as gloomy and hard as ever when she
lifted herself up and looked at him.

"What have I done to offend you?" cried she, quite frightened. "I
have heard of a woman, such as I am, who washed the feet of Jesus with
perfumes. Alas! virtue has made me so poor that I have nothing but tears
to offer you."

"Have you not understood?" he answered, in a cruel voice. "I tell you,
you must be able to come out of the house to which I shall take you so
completely changed, physically and morally, that no man or woman you
have ever known will be able to call you 'Esther' and make you look
round. Yesterday your love could not give you strength enough so
completely to bury the prostitu