who never sets foot inside the doors of any woman in his parish unless it is a question of raising money for his poor or his church? For a moment I thought this was what he had come for now.

‘He had prepared my daughter at the proper time for her first communion; and as she went regularly to communion, subsequently, she had retained him as her confessor. For this reason, over and over again since then, I had invited the good priest to dine with us, but always in vain. On entering the room he displayed the greatest agitation, and I read in his usually placid features manifest signs of an embarrassment so extreme and so uncontrollable, I could not set it down to the account of mere shyness. Involuntarily the first words that escaped me were: “Good heavens, Father! What is the matter?”

““The matter, dear madame,’ he began, ‘…the matter is, you see, before you the most embarrassed man in Europe. For fifty years I have been a minister in God’s service, and all that time I have never had a more delicate mission to perform, or one that baffled me more completely to understand.…’

“‘Then he sat down, asking me to have the door shut against all comers throughout our interview. As you may suppose, all these solemn preliminaries began rather to frighten me.…

“‘Noticing this, he added: ‘Nay! do not be frightened, I beg of you; you will need all your calmness to attend to my story, and to account, to my satisfaction, for the unheard-of circumstance we have to deal with, and which even now I cannot believe authentic.…Your daughter, madame, on whose behalf I am here, is—you know it as well as I do—an angel of purity and goodness. I know her very soul. I have held it between my hands since she was a child of seven, and I am convinced she is deceiving herself—through sheer innocence of heart, it may be.…But this morning she came to me to avow in confession—you will not believe it, nor can I, but the word must come out—that she was pregnant!’

“‘A cry escaped me of wonder and incredulity.…

““I did the very same thing this morning in my confessional,’ the priest declared, ‘on hearing her make this assertion, accompanied as it was by every mark of the most genuine and terrible despair. I know the child thoroughly; she is absolutely ignorant of the world and its wickedness.…Of all the young girls, I confess, she is undoubtedly the one I could most unhesitatingly answer for before God.—There is no more to tell! We priests are the surgeons of souls, and it is our duty to deliver them of shameful secrets they would fain conceal, with hands careful neither to wound nor pollute. I therefore proceeded, with all possible guardedness, to interrogate, question, and cross-question the desperate girl. But, the avowal once made, the fault once confessed—she calls it a crime herself, and her eternal damnation, fully believing herself, poor girl, a lost soul—she thenceforth refused to say another word, maintaining an obstinate silence which she broke only to beseech me to come to you, madame, to inform you of the crime—“for mamma must know,” she said, “and I shall never, never be brave enough to tell her”.’

“‘You may easily imagine with what mingled feelings of amazement and anxiety I listened to the curé of Saint-Germain des-Prés. I was just as sure as he was, surer, in fact, of my little girl’s innocence; but do not the innocent sometimes fall, out of very innocence?…And what she had told the confessor was not in the nature of things impossible.…I did not believe it!…could not believe it! but still it was not in itself impossible!…She was only thirteen, but she was a woman, and the very fact of her precocity had startled me before now.…’ A fever, a frenzy of curiosity came over me.

““I must and will know all!’ I cried excitedly to the worthy priest as he stood there listening to me with a bewildered air, plucking his hat to pieces in his agitation. ‘Leave me, Father. She would not speak before you; but I am certain she will tell me everything.…I am certain I can drag everything out of her. Then we shall understand what is now so utterly incomprehensible.’

“‘On this the good priest took his departure. The instant he was gone I sprang upstairs to my daughter’s room, not having patience enough to send for her and wait till she came.