hurried on. "Greater joy it has been to me to hear from the same
venerable source that, while found bravest among the defenders of your
country, you are clear from all alliance with the assailants of your God.
Continue so, continue so, Victor de Mauleon,"

She retreated to the door, and then turned towards him with a look in
which all the marble had melted away, adding, with words more formally
nunlike, yet unmistakably womanlike, than those which had gone before,
"That to the last you may be true to God, is a prayer never by me
omitted."

She spoke, and vanished.

In a kind of dim and dreamlike bewilderment, Victor de Mauleon found
himself without the walls of the convent. Mechanically, as a man does
when the routine of his life is presented to him, from the first Minister
of State to the poor clown at a suburban theatre, doomed to appear at
their posts, to prose on a Beer Bill, or grin through a horse-collar,
though their hearts are bleeding at every pore with some household or
secret affliction,--mechanically De Mauldon went his way towards the
ramparts, at a section of which he daily drilled his raw recruits.
Proverbial for his severity towards those who offended, for the
cordiality of his praise of those who pleased his soldierly judgment,
no change of his demeanour was visible that morning, save that he might
be somewhat milder to the one, somewhat less hearty to the other. This
routine duty done, he passed slowly towards a more deserted because a
more exposed part of the defences, and seated himself on the frozen sward
alone. The cannon thundered around him. He heard unconsciously: from
time to time an _obus_ hissed and splintered close at his feet;--he saw
with abstracted eye. His soul was with the past; and, brooding over all