form such bonds with such feelings? Would it be honorable to break,
without further developments, the betrothal which had been between her
and her father the condition of her baptism? She was already there,
after so few days! And her wound was deeper after the night on which the
Prince had, uttered his careless jests.

"It is permitted you to withdraw," replied Monsieur Guerillot, "but you
are not permitted to lack charity in your judgment."

There was within Fanny too much sincerity, her faith was too simple and
too deep for her not to follow out that advice to the letter, and she
conformed to it in deeds as well as in intentions. For, before taking a
walk in the afternoon with Alba, she took the greatest care to remove all
traces which the little scene of the day before could have left in her
friend's mind. Her efforts went very far. She would ask pardon of her
fiance.... Pardon! For what? For having been wounded by him, wounded
to the depths of her sensibility? She felt that the charity of judgment
recommended by the pious Cardinal was a difficult virtue. It exercises a
discipline of the entire heart, sometimes irreconcilable with the
clearness of the intelligence. Alba looked at her friend with a glance
full of an astonishment, almost sorrowful, and she embraced her, saying:

"Peppino is not worthy even to kiss the ground on which you tread, that
is my opinion, and if he does not spend his entire life in trying to be
worthy of you, it will be a crime."

As for the Prince himself, the impulses which dictated to his fiancee
words of apology when he was in the wrong, were not unintelligible to
him, as they would have been to Hafner. He thought that the latter had
lectured his daughter, and he congratulated himself on having cut short