They had lent her the life of her patroness, Catherine of Genoa, and she had bought for herself _The Castle of the Soul_, by St. Theresa. Few confessors could follow her in these mystic flights. They who spoke clumsily of such things gave her pain. She could not keep either her mother’s confessor, the cathedral-priest, or another, a Carmelite, or even the old Jesuit Sabatier. At sixteen she found a priest of Saint Louis, a highly spiritual person. She spent days in church, to such a degree that her mother, by this time a widow and often in want of her, had to punish her, for all her own piety, on her return home. It was not the girl’s fault, however: during her ecstasies she quite forgot herself. So great a saint was she accounted by the girls of her own age, that sometimes at mass they seemed to see the Host drawn on by the moving power of her love, until it flew up and placed itself of its own accord in her mouth. Her two young brothers differed from each other in their feelings towards Girard. The elder, who lived with the Friar Preachers, shared the natural dislike of all Dominicans for the Jesuit. The other, who was studying with the Jesuits in order to become a priest, regarded Girard as a great man, a very saint, a man to honour as a hero. Of this younger brother, sickly like herself, Catherine was very fond. His ceaseless talking about Girard was sure to do its work upon her. One day she met the father in the street. He looked so grave, but so good and mild withal, that a voice within her said, “Behold the man to whose guidance thou art given!” The next Saturday, when she came to confess to him, he said that he had been expecting her. In her amazed emotion she never dreamed that her brother might have given him warning, but fancied that the mysterious voice had spoken to him also, and that they two were sharing the heavenly communion of warnings from the world above. Six months of summer passed away, and yet Girard, who confessed her every Saturday, had taken no step towards her. The scandal about old Sabatier had set him on his guard. His own prudence would have held him to an attachment of a darker kind for such a one as the Guiol, who was certainly very mature, but also ardent and a devil incarnate.