mages of
worldliness. His despotic authority was needed to tempt the young saint
to such profanation. Herrera disguised himself so effectually as a
military man, that Esther hardly recognized him; he took care to make
his companion wear a veil, and put her in a box where she was hidden
from all eyes.

This palliative, which had no risks for innocence so sincerely regained,
soon lost its effect. The convent-boarder viewed her protector's dinners
with disgust, had a religious aversion for the theatre, and relapsed
into melancholy.

"She is dying of love for Lucien," said Herrera to himself; he had
wanted to sound the depths of this soul, and know how much could be
exacted from it.

So the moment came when the poor child was no longer upheld by moral
force, and the body was about to break down. The priest calculated the
time with the hideous practical sagacity formerly shown by executioners
in the art of torture. He found his protegee in the garden, sitting on a
bench under a trellis on which the April sun fell gently; she seemed to
be cold and trying to warm herself; her companions looked with interest
at her pallor as of a folded plant, her eyes like those of a dying
gazelle, her drooping attitude. Esther rose and went to meet the
Spaniard with a lassitude that showed how little life there was in her,
and, it may be added, how little care to live. This hapless outcast,
this wild and wounded swallow, moved Carlos Herrera to compassion for
the second time. The gloomy minister, whom God should have employed only
to carry out His revenges, received the sick girl with a smile, which
expressed, indeed, as much bitterness as sweetness, as much vengeance
as charity. Esther, practised in meditation, and used to revulsions of
feeling since she had led this almost monastic life, felt on her part,
for the second time, distrust of her protector; but, as on the former
occasion, his speech reassured her.

"Well, my dear child," said he, "and why have you never spoken to me of
Lucien?"

"I promised you," she said, shuddering convulsively from head to foot;
"I swore to you that I would never breathe his name."

"And yet you have not ceased to think of him."

"That, monsieur, is the only fault I have committed. I think of him
always; and just as you came, I was saying his name to myself."

"Absence is killing you?"

Esther's only answer was to hang her head as the sick do who already
scent the breath of the grave.

"If you c