upon the steps. To whom belonged these tell-tale signs
of occupation? Glancing farther up she saw the end of a stick
protruding from the loose piles of straw that trickled over the top of
the ladder, and she recognized the stick, a stout one with a peculiar
ferule that also belonged to Crabbe. He must be in the loft, either
sleeping or keeping silence, and now she found herself in the most
uncomfortable position a woman can possibly occupy; to her already
crowded list of lovers had been added another, and as the quarry of
four strongly contrasted men, each possessing more than average
persistence of character, she must have excited pity and sympathy in
the breasts of women less fatally attractive, but scarcely one thrill
of envy. She recognized in the priest potentially the fiercest lover
of them all; a man of only two or three ideas, this one of cruel,
hopeless, unattainable passion for herself would easily dominate him
and render him, fresh to the emotions and therefore ignorant of how to
control and deal with them, utterly unreasonable, even it might be
violent and offensive. What wonder then if her thoughts like her eyes
turned toward the loft above her. Despite her flighty tendencies, her
town and theatre friendships and quarrels, her impulsive and emotional
nature, Crabbe was the only man who had gained an ascendancy over her;
for him she had forsaken prudence, but for him only, and strongest of
associations, closest of ties--he alone had appealed to and satisfied
her physical side. She had given him much but not all, and now in this
moment of hatred of the _cure_, of herself, and a moving disgust at the
conflicting facts of her difficult life, she thought of the Englishman
as a desired refuge. There came crowding into her mind those small
delicate acts and gestures which make as we say "the gentleman." She
recollected Crabbe as he was when he first presented himself at the
_metairie_, the self-possession of his easy manner, subtly tinctured
with that dose of romance necessary to her imagination; the unconscious
way, to do him justice, in which his talk of blight and exile and
ruined fortunes had aroused all her dormant sympathies.

"Oh," she cried, hoping that if in the loft he would hear, "all this is
so dreadful, so different from the life I meant to lead, from the life
I believe I was intended to lead! Hear me, Father Rielle: all men I
hate and abhor, all, save one, and not the one you are thinking of