This priest was young. He was kind-hearted. He had lived in the world. A great sorrow had impelled him, crushed and broken, to assume the gown wherein he wore mourning for his heart. There remained something of the man in the depths of his being, and he listened, with melancholy compassion, to the outpouring of this maidservant's suffering heart. He understood that Germinie needed him, that he sustained and strengthened her, that he saved her from herself and removed her from the temptations to which her nature exposed her. He was conscious of a sad sympathy for that heart overflowing with affection, for the ardent, yet tractable girl, for the unhappy creature who knew nothing of her own nature, who was promised to passion by every impulse of her heart, by her whole body, and who betrayed in every detail of her person the vocation of her temperament. Enlightened by his past experience, he was amazed and terrified sometimes by the gleams that emanated from her, by the flame that shot from her eyes at the outburst of love in a prayer, by the evident tendency of her confessions, by her constantly recurring to that scene of violence, that scene in which her perfectly sincere purpose to resist seemed to the priest to have been betrayed by a convulsion of the senses that was stronger than she. This fever of religion lasted several years, during which Germinie lived a concentrated, silent, happy life, entirely devoted to God's service--at least she thought so. Her confessor, however, had come gradually to the conclusion that all her adoration tended toward himself. By her glances, by her blushes, by the words she no longer said to him, and by others which she made bold to say to him for the first time, he realized that his penitent's devotion was going astray and becoming unduly fervent, deceiving itself as to its object. She watched for him when the services were at an end, followed him into the sacristy, hung on his skirts, ran into the church after his cassock. The confessor tried to warn her, to divert her amorous fervor from himself. He became more reserved and assumed a cold demeanor. In despair at this change, at his apparent indifference, Germinie, feeling bitter and hurt, confessed to him one day, in the confessional, the hatred that had taken possession of her for two young girls, who were his favorite penitents. Thereupon the priest dismissed her, without discussion, and sent her to another confessor. Germinie went once or twice to confess to this other confessor; then she ceased to go; soon she ceased even to think of going, and of all her religion naught remained in her mind but a certain far-off sweetness, like the faint odor of burned-out incense.