“You are right,” she faltered.  “Yes, I am sad at heart, and need your consolation.  I must tell you of it all.  When I was a child I seldom, if ever, entered a church; now I cannot be present at a service without feeling touched to the very depths of my being.  Yes; and what drew tears from me just now was that voice of Paris, sounding like a mighty organ, that immeasurable night, and those beauteous heavens.  Oh!  I would fain believe.  Help me; teach me.”

Abbe Jouve calmed her somewhat by lightly placing his hand on her own.

“Tell me everything,” he merely said.

She struggled for a time, her heart wrung with anguish.

“There’s nothing to tell, I assure you.  I’m hiding nothing from you.  I weep without cause, because I feel stifled, because my tears gush out of their own accord.  You know what my life has been.  No sorrow, no sin, no remorse could I find in it to this hour.  I do not know—­I do not know—­”

Her voice died away, and from the priest’s lips slowly came the words,
“You love, my daughter!”

She started; she dared not protest.  Silence fell on them once more.  In the sea of shadows that slumbered before them a light had glimmered forth.  It seemed at their feet, somewhere in the abyss, but at what precise spot they would have been unable to specify.  And then, one by one, other lights broke through the darkness, shooting into instant life, and remaining stationary, scintillating like stars.  It seemed as though thousands of fresh planets were rising on the surface of a gloomy lake.  Soon they stretched out in double file, starting from the Trocadero, and nimbly leaping towards Paris.  Then these files were intersected by others, curves were described, and a huge, strange, magnificent constellation spread out.  Helene never breathed a word, but gazed on these gleams of light, which made the heavens seemingly descend below the line of the horizon, as though indeed the earth had vanished and the vault of heaven were on every side.  And Helene’s heart was again flooded with emotion, as a few minutes before when Charles’s-Wain had slowly begun to revolve round the Polar axis, its shaft in the air.  Paris, studded with lights, stretched out, deep and sad, prompting fearful thoughts of a firmament swarming with unknown worlds.

Meanwhile the priest, in the monotonous, gentle voice which he had acquired by years of duty in the confessional, continued whispering in her ear.  One evening in the past he had warned her; solitude, he had said, would be harmful to her welfare.  No one could with impunity live outside the pale of life.  She had imprisoned herself too closely, and the door had opened to perilous thoughts.

“I am very old now, my daughter,” he murmured, “and I have frequently seen women come to us weeping and praying, with a craving to find faith and religion.  Thus it is that I cannot be deceiving myself to-day.  These women, who seem to seek God in so zealous a manner, are but souls rendered miserable by passion.  It is a man whom they worship in our churches.”