o be impatient; she felt, in the
redoubling of her blissful agony, the material drawing near, as it were,
of the blessed Saturday evening; and when Saturday came and
mademoiselle's dinner had been hastily served and her work done, she
would make her escape and run to Notre-Dame de Lorette, hurrying to the
penitential stool as to a lover's rendezvous. Her fingers dipped in holy
water and a genuflexion duly made, she would glide over the flags,
between the rows of chairs, as softly as a cat steals across a carpeted
floor. With bent head, almost crawling, she would go noiselessly forward
in the shadow of the side aisles, until she reached the mysterious,
veiled confessional, where she would pause and await her turn, absorbed
in the emotion of suspense.

The young priest who confessed her, encouraged her frequent confessions.
He was not sparing of time or attention or charity. He allowed her to
talk at great length and tell him, with many words, of all her petty
troubles. He was indulgent to the diffuseness of a suffering soul, and
permitted her to pour out freely her most trivial afflictions. He
listened while she set forth her anxieties, her longings, her troubles;
he did not repel or treat with scorn any portion of the confidences of a
servant who spoke to him of all the most delicate, secret concerns of
her existence, as one would speak to a mother and a physician.

This priest was young. He was kind-hearted. He had lived in the world. A
great sorrow had impelled him, crushed and broken, to assume the gown
wherein he wore mourning for his heart. There remained something of the
man in the depths of his being, and he listened, with melancholy
compassion, to the outpouring of this maidservant's suffering heart. He
understood that Germinie needed him, that he sustained and strengthened
her, that he saved her from herself and removed her from the temptations
to which her nature exposed her. He was conscious of a sad sympathy for
that heart overflowing with affection, for the ardent, yet tractable
girl, for the unhappy creature who knew nothing of her own nature, who
was promised to passion by every impulse of her heart, by her whole
body, and who betrayed in every detail of her person the vocation of her
temperament. Enlightened by his past experience, he was amazed and
terrified sometimes by the gleams that emanated from her, by the flame
that shot from her eyes at the outburst of love in a prayer, by the
evident tendency