take you to Bras Rouge's, where you will be drowned,
and we will set Bouqueval farm on fire. So, come, decide. I know, if you
take the oath, you will keep it.'"

"And you did swear?"

"Alas, yes, madame! I was so fearful they would do my protectors at the
farm an injury, and then I so much dreaded being drowned by La Chouette
in a cellar, it seemed so frightful to me; another death would have
seemed to me less horrid, and, perhaps, I should not have tried to
escape it."

"What a dreadful idea at your age!" said Madame d'Harville, looking at
La Goualeuse with surprise. "When you have left this place, and have
been restored to your benefactors, shall you not be very happy? Has not
your repentance effaced the past?"

"Can the past ever be effaced? Can the past ever be forgotten? Can
repentance kill memory, madame?" exclaimed Fleur-de-Marie, in a tone so
despairing that Clemence shuddered.

"But all faults are retrieved, unhappy girl!"

"And the remembrance of stain, madame, does not that become more and
more terrible in proportion as the soul becomes purer, in proportion as
the mind becomes more elevated? Alas, the higher we ascend, the deeper
appears the abyss which we have quitted!"

"Then you renounce all hope of restoration--of pardon?"

"On the part of others--no, madame, your kindness proves to me that
remorse will find indulgence."

"But you will be pitiless towards yourself?"

"Others, madame, may not know, pardon, or forget what I have been, but I
shall never forget it!"

"And do you sometimes desire to die?"

"Sometimes!" said Goualeuse, smiling bitterly. Then, after a moment's
silence, she added, "Sometimes,--yes, madame."

"Still you were afraid of being disfigured by that horrid woman; and so
you wish to preserve your beauty, my poor little girl. That proves that
life has still some attraction for you; so courage! Courage!"

"It is, perhaps, weakness to think of it, but if I were handsome, as you
say, madame, I should like to die handsome, pronouncing the name of my
benefactor."

Madame d'Harville's eyes filled with tears. Fleur-de-Marie had said
these last words with so much simplicity; her angelic, pale, depressed
features, her melancholy smile, were all so much in accord with her
words, that it was impossible to doubt the reality of her sad desire.
Madame d'Harville was endued with too much delicacy not to feel how
miserable, how fatal, was this thought of La Goualeuse: "I shall never
fo