Bardin. He is the
only person I have seen since my return. It seems to me I am coming back
to my old ideas--you remember how I once wished to end my days in the
cell of a Carmelite? You might love me again then, perhaps, and Fred and
poor Madame d'Argy, who must feel so bitterly against me since her son
was wounded, might forgive me. No one feels bitterly against the dead,
and it is the same as being dead to be a Carmelite nun. You would all
speak of me sometimes to each other as one who had been very unhappy,
who had been guilty of great foolishness, but who had repaired her
faults as best she could."

Poor Jacqueline! She was no longer a girl of the period; in her grief
and humiliation she belonged to the past. Old-fashioned forms of
penitence attracted her.

"And what did the Abbe Bardin tell you?" asked Giselle, with a slight
movement of her shoulders.

"He only told me that he could not say at present whether that were my
vocation."

"Nor can I," said Giselle.

Jacqueline lifted up her face, wet with tears, which she had been
leaning on the lap of Giselle.

"I do not see what else I can do, unless you would get me a place as
governess somewhere at the ends of the earth," she said. "I could teach
children their letters. I should not mind doing anything. I never
should complain. Ah! if you lived all by yourself, Giselle, how I should
implore you to take me to teach little Enguerrand!"

"I think you might do better than that," said Giselle, wiping her
friend's eyes almost as a mother might have done, "if you would only
listen to Fred."

Jacqueline's cheeks became crimson.

"Don't mock me--it is cruel--I am too unworthy--it would pain me to
see him. Shame--regret--you understand! But I can tell you one thing,
Giselle--only you. You may tell it to him when he is quite old, when he
has been long married, and when everything concerning me is a thing of
the past. I never had loved any one with all my heart up to the moment
when I read in that paper that he had fought for me, that his blood had
flowed for me, that after all that had passed he still thought me worthy
of being defended by him."

Her tears flowed fast, and she added: "I shall be proud of that all the
rest of my life! If only you, too, would forgive me."

The heart of Giselle was melted by these words.

"Forgive you, my dear little girl? Ah! you have been better than I. I
forgot our old friendship for a moment--I was harsh to you; and I have
so