good priest without much ceremony.

The old parish church of St. Eustache was dark. Besides the perpetual
lamp, there were only four flambeaux of yellow wax, which, attached above
the fonts against the principal pillars, cast a red glimmer upon the blue
and black marble of the empty church. The light scarcely penetrated the
deep niches of the aisles of the sacred building. In one of the chapels
--the darkest of them--was the confessional, of which we have before
spoken, whose high iron grating and thick double planks left visible only
the small dome and the wooden cross. Here, on either side, knelt Cinq-
Mars and Marie de Mantua. They could scarcely see each other, but found
that the Abbe Quillet, seated between them, was there awaiting them.
They could see through the little grating the shadow of his hood. Henri
d'Effiat approached slowly; he was regulating, as it were, the remainder
of his destiny. It was not before his king that he was about to appear,
but before a more powerful sovereign, before her for whom he had
undertaken his immense work. He was about to test her faith; and he
trembled.

He trembled still more when his young betrothed knelt opposite to him;
he trembled, because at the sight of this angel he could not help feeling
all the happiness he might lose. He dared not speak first, and remained
for an instant contemplating her head in the shade, that young head upon
which rested all his hopes. Despite his love, whenever he looked upon
her he could not refrain from a kind of dread at having undertaken so
much for a girl, whose passion was but a feeble reflection of his own,
and who perhaps would not appreciate all the sacrifices he had made for
her--bending the firm character of his mind to the compliances of a
courtier, condemning it to the intrigues and sufferings of ambition,
abandoning it to profound combinations, to criminal meditations, to the