"Ah, monsieur, how many long and happy evenings have I thus passed in the intimacy of these two persons, so culpable and yet so virtuous! How many times has this fatal and bizarre contrast almost troubled my reason! How many summer evenings, in quitting them, have I, instead of returning to the presbytery, gone to wander on the mountain slopes, to meditate in silence in the sight of God alone! 'Oh, Lord,' cried I, 'how impenetrable are thy ways! This woman is an adulteress, and is fully conscious of her fault, since she constantly deplores it. She is very guilty in thy sight and in the sight of men, and yet, what life could be more exemplary, more beneficent, more practically touching and virtuous, than the one she leads? How many times have I not heard her chanting hymns in thy praise, in a voice so filled with religious fervour as to carry conviction of her faith! Oh, dear Lord, what dangerous things are vice and crime, when they clothe themselves under such deceptive appearances! Must we hate them more? Ought we to have pity on them? Should they not deserve our pardon? And he, that strange man who says he has no faith in our religions, of what religion is he? What can be that ignored religion which imposes on him a life of such goodness and generosity, which makes him so humane, which causes him to be loved and blessed by every one? From what unknown source does he derive those principles of a wise and far-reaching charity? And yet they say that he has respected nothing that men hold holy and sacred, that he has trampled underfoot every law of social life. And it must be true, for if his love of to-day is unlawful, his former life was more criminal still; they say so, and I believe it; for, as by a flash of lightning one can see the immensity of the abyss, so, in that fearful moment in which he feared to lose the one he loved, I had penetrated into the depths of his soul, and I had shuddered with terror. And yet his conduct has never given the lie to the nobility of his sentiments. Oh, God, thy ways are impenetrable!' I repeated more undecided than ever, as I humbled myself before the mysterious designs of Providence. I was soon to have a terrible proof of how his inexorable justice inevitably reaches the guilty. "Alas! monsieur, my tale is nearing its end, and that end is a frightful one.