thinking of the mother
of the Saviour, she went, with a soul convulsed by anguish, to the house
of the hated rector. There she found the modest priest in an outer room,
engaged in putting away the flax and yarns with which he supplied poor
women, in order that they might never be wholly out of work,--a form
of charity which saved many who were incapable of begging from actual
penury. The rector left his yarns and hastened to take Madame Granson
into his dining-room, where the wretched mother noticed, as she looked
at his supper, the frugal method of his own living.

"Monsieur l'abbe," she said, "I have come to implore you--" She burst
into tears, unable to continue.

"I know what brings you," replied the saintly man. "I must trust to you,
madame, and to your relation, Madame du Bousquier, to pacify Monseigneur
the Bishop at Seez. Yes, I will pray for your unhappy child; yes, I will
say the masses. But we must avoid all scandal, and give no opportunity
for evil-judging persons to assemble in the church. I alone, without
other clergy, at night--"

"Yes, yes, as you think best; if only he may lie in consecrated ground,"
said the poor mother, taking the priest's hand and kissing it.

Toward midnight a coffin was clandestinely borne to the parish church by
four young men, comrades whom Athanase had liked the best. A few friends
of Madame Granson, women dressed in black, and veiled, were present; and
half a dozen other young men who had been somewhat intimate with this
lost genius. Four torches flickered on the coffin, which was covered
with crape. The rector, assisted by one discreet choirboy, said the
mortuary mass. Then the body of the suicide was noiselessly carried to a
corner of the cemetery, where a black wooden cross, without inscription,
was all that indicated its place hereafter to the mother. Athanase lived
and died in shadow. No voice was raised to blame the rector; the bishop
kept silence. The piety of the mother redeemed the impiety of the son's
last act.

Some months later, the poor woman, half beside herself with grief, and
moved by one of those inexplicable thirsts which misery feels to steep
its lips in the bitter chalice, determined to see the spot where her son
was drowned. Her instinct may have told her that thoughts of his could
be recovered beneath that poplar; perhaps, too, she desired to see
what his eyes had seen for the last time. Some mothers would die of the
sight; others give themselves up