that the
great Author of this majestic creation keeps account of it; and one
night there came to him, like a spirit walking on the sea, the awful,
silent question: 'My account with God--how does it stand?' Ah! friends,
that is a question which the book of nature does not answer.

"Did I say the book of nature is a catechism? Yes. But, after it answers
the first question with 'God,' nothing but questions follow; and so, one
day, this man gave a ship full of merchandise for one little book which
answered those questions. God help him to understand it! and God help
you, monsieur, and you, madame, sitting here in your _smuggled clothes_,
to beat upon the breast with me and cry, 'I, too, Lord--I, too, stood by
and consented.'"

Pere Jerome had not intended these for his closing words; but just
there, straight away before his sight and almost at the farthest door, a
man rose slowly from his seat and regarded him steadily with a kind,
bronzed, sedate face, and the sermon, as if by a sign of command, was
ended. While the Credo was being chanted he was still there; but when, a
moment after its close, the eye of Pere Jerome returned in that
direction, his place was empty.

As the little priest, his labor done and his vestments changed, was
turning into the Rue Royale and leaving the cathedral out of sight, he
just had time to understand that two women were purposely allowing him
to overtake them, when the one nearer him spoke in the Creole _patois,_
saying, with some timid haste:

"Good-morning, Pere--Pere Jerome; Pere Jerome, we thank the good God for
that sermon."

"Then, so do I," said the little man. They were the same two that he had
noticed when he was preaching. The younger one bowed silently; she was a
beautiful figure, but the slight effort of Pere Jerome's kind eyes to
see through the veil was vain. He would presently have passed on, but
the one who had spoken before said:

"I thought you lived in the Rue des Ursulines."

"Yes; but I am going this way to see a sick person."

The woman looked up at him with an expression of mingled confidence and
timidity.

"It must be a blessed thing to be so useful as to be needed by the good
God," she said.

Pere Jerome smiled:

"God does not need me to look after his sick; but he allows me to do it,
just as you let your little boy in frocks carry in chips." He might have
added that he loved to do it, quite as much.

It was plain the woman had somewhat to ask, and was