In this difficulty the Superior appealed to the Abbe Herrera.  The Spaniard came, saw that Esther’s condition was desperate, and took the physician aside for a moment.  After this confidential interview, the man of science told the man of faith that the only cure lay in a journey to Italy.  The Abbe would not hear of such a journey before Esther’s baptism and first Communion.

“How long will it be till then?” asked the doctor.

“A month,” replied the Superior.

“She will be dead,” said the doctor.

“Yes, but in a state of grace and salvation,” said the Abbe.

In Spain the religious question is supreme, above all political, civil, or vital considerations; so the physician did not answer the Spaniard.  He turned to the Mother Superior, but the terrible Abbe took him by the arm and stopped him.

“Not a word, monsieur!” said he.

The doctor, though a religious man and a Monarchist, looked at Esther with an expression of tender pity.  The girl was as lovely as a lily drooping on its stem.

“God help her, then!” he exclaimed as he went away.

On the very day of this consultation, Esther was taken by her protector to the Rocher de Cancale, a famous restaurant, for his wish to save her had suggested strange expedients to the priest.  He tried the effect of two excesses—­an excellent dinner, which might remind the poor child of past orgies; and the opera, which would give her mind some images of worldliness.  His despotic authority was needed to tempt the young saint to such profanation.  Herrera disguised himself so effectually as a military man, that Esther hardly recognized him; he took care to make his companion wear a veil, and put her in a box where she was hidden from all eyes.

This palliative, which had no risks for innocence so sincerely regained, soon lost its effect.  The convent-boarder viewed her protector’s dinners with disgust, had a religious aversion for the theatre, and relapsed into melancholy.

“She is dying of love for Lucien,” said Herrera to himself; he had wanted to sound the depths of this soul, and know how much could be exacted from it.

So the moment came when the poor child was no longer upheld by moral force, and the body was about to break down.  The priest calculated the time with the hideous practical sagacity formerly shown by executioners in the art of torture.  He found his protegee in the garden, sitting on a bench under a trellis on which the April sun fell gently; she seemed to be cold and trying to warm herself; her companions looked with interest at her pallor as of a folded plant, her eyes like those of a dying gazelle, her drooping attitude.  Esther rose and went to meet the Spaniard with a lassitude that showed how little life there was in her, and, it may be added, how little care to live.  This hapless outcast, this wild and wounded swallow, moved Carlos Herrera to compassion for the