person of her father; she saw him getting off his mule at the door of
the manor-house, and taking her by the hand to lead her up the stairs;
she recalled how her prattle drove from his brow the judicial cares he
did not always lay aside with his black or his red robes, the white
fur of which fell one day by chance under the snipping of her
mischievous scissors. She cast but one glance at the confessor of her
aunt, the mother-superior of a convent of Poor Clares, a rigid and
fanatical old man, whose duty it was to initiate her into the
mysteries of religion. Hardened by the severities necessary against
heretics, the old priest never ceased to jangle the chains of hell; he
told her of nothing but the vengeance of Heaven, and made her tremble
with the assurance that God's eye was on her. Rendered timid, she
dared not raise her eyes in the priest's presence, and ceased to have
any feeling but respect for her mother, whom up to that time she had
made a sharer in all her frolics. When she saw that beloved mother
turning her blue eyes towards her with an appearance of anger, a
religious terror took possession of the girl's heart.

Then suddenly the vision took her to the second period of her
childhood, when as yet she understood nothing of the things of life.
She thought with an almost mocking regret of the days when all her
happiness was to work beside her mother in the tapestried salon, to
pray in the church, to sing her ballads to a lute, to read in secret a
romance of chivalry, to pluck the petals of a flower, discover what
gift her father would make her on the feast of the Blessed Saint-John,
and find out the meaning of speeches repressed before her. Passing
thus from her childish joys through the sixteen years of her girlhood,
the grace of those softly flowing years when she knew no pain was
eclipsed by the brightness of a memory precious though ill-fated. The
joyous peace of her childhood was far less sweet to her than a single