cry this time.

— No! This time you did not cry; it was my turn.

And he looked at her face and saw it drowned in tears...

The days pass; the blind girl grows, and the pastor's children grow. The eldest of them, Jacques, goes off to Lausanne to pursue his theological studies, and when he comes home one day to spend the summer holiday in his father's house, he gives himself to helping his father in teaching Gertrude. She had gone a long way by then in the study of music and had begun to accompany the church choir on Sundays and feast days. And the blind girl moves to the house of a charitable lady who opened for her, in her own house, a little school for the blind, bringing her at first two small young ladies for her to teach reading and some handwork.

And “love and youth and the longed-for hope” go seeking to join two limpid souls...

And the pastor moves to cut off their road to happiness, and sent the young lover away before the school holiday was over.

A famous doctor hears of Gertrude and volunteers to perform a surgical operation, having satisfied himself of its success after exam-ining her eyes minutely. Gertrude goes to the hospital and comes back with her sight restored. The pastor's family made ready to receive her; the children decked the house for her with all the flowers of the hillside... And the pastor waits...

The carriage arrived, and from it stepped the doctor, and Gertrude, and the pastor's wife, and the children...

And here I had best take the last chapter from the memoirs of the hero of the novel, written on the evening of that day:

“... Into what an abyss I have sunk! Thy mercy, O my Lord! I will cease to love her — but do not suffer her to die. I was right to be afraid! What has she done? What did she mean to do? My wife and my daughter said they went with her to her house and delivered her

to Madame M... After that came the reports, all of them strange and contradictory. The gardener says he saw her walking along the bank of the little river, then crossing the bridge, then bending down and disappearing into the water, the current carrying her to near the weir. The doctor is still here, and he does not know how to explain the accident. She is still out of her senses — or else she does not wish to speak.

She breathes with great labor, and the doctor fears pneumonia. When they drew her out of the water they neglected to take off her clothes, and they were soaked with water icy as frost.

Madame M explains the accident thus: she wanted to pick the flowers that grow in abundance on the bank, and, not yet being accustomed to seeing things, she took the carpet of flowers growing beside the water for dry ground; her foot slipped in the mud and she fell, and the current dragged her away!

Ah, my God, how I wish their account were true, that this weight might be lifted from my conscience! Her strange smile at luncheon kept troubling my mind, and I strained to persuade myself that this smile of hers was in keeping with her new gaze — a smile that seemed to me to run down her cheeks like tears. Before that strange smile I suffered at the shallowness of the company's gaiety... a gaiety in which she took no part, as though she had sud-denly discovered some deep secret.

O my God! Have mercy! Grant that she may speak to me! Else how am I to live on? Did she wish for death because she had learned some-thing? And what is it she saw, once she beheld the light? My friend! What is the tremendous thing that was kept hidden from you and that you discovered all at once?

I spent two hours beside her bed, my eyes on her hair, her forehead, her sallow cheeks, her thin eyelids closed upon a sorrow past all description, and on her hair, wet with water, thrown across the pillow. I stayed so, listening to her choked and troubled breathing.”

And in the diary, under the date of the following day:

“Miss M called me to her this

morning and said that Gertrude had come back to her senses. When I entered her room she smiled at me and motioned me to sit beside her bed. I dared not put a question, and no doubt she in her turn feared that I would ask; so she said, to ward off every question:

— What do you call those little flowers, blue as the color of the sky, that grow beside the river? Will you bring me a bunch of them to have here by my bed?

Her forced playfulness hurt me; she understood, and said gravely:

— I cannot talk now. I am perish-ing of weariness. Go and pick me the flowers, and come back quickly.

She had not the strength to receive me during the day, so great was her exhaustion...

I saw her this evening, pillows all about her, propping her on every side so that she seemed to be sitting up. Her hair was plaited and gathered above her forehead, and woven into it were the blue spring flowers I had picked in the morning.

I laid my hand in hers, burning with fever; she kept hold of it, and then said:

— I must make a confession to you, pastor. I am afraid I shall die tonight. I lied to you this morning. No — what happened did not happen because I wanted to pick flowers! Will you forgive me if I say that I wanted to die?

At that I fell on my knees beside her bed, her thin hand in mine; she drew it away and began to stroke my forehead, and I buried my head in the bedclothes to smother my sobbing. She said tenderly:

— Do you find such great evil in what I did?

And when I did not answer, she went on:

— You see, my friend, that I fill a large place in your life and in your heart... and this became clear to me at once, the moment I returned. Or at least it appeared to me that the place I fill belongs

to another — and that “she” grieves because of it. My