When a person's conscience is involved, the least thing becomes exceedingly serious. Madame de ----- has told her young friend, Madame de Fischtaminel, that she had been compelled to make an extraordinary confession to her spiritual director, and to perform penance, the director having decided that she was in a state of mortal sin. This lady, who goes to mass every morning, is a woman of thirty-six years, thin and slightly pimpled. She has large soft black eyes, her upper lip is strongly shaded: still her voice is sweet, her manners gentle, her gait noble--she is a woman of quality. Madame de Fischtaminel, whom Madame de ----- has made her friend (nearly all pious women patronize a woman who is considered worldly, on the pretext of converting her),--Madame de Fischtaminel asserts that these qualities, in this Caroline of the Pious Sort, are a victory of religion over a rather violent natural temper. These details are necessary to describe the trouble in all its horror. This lady's Adolphe had been compelled to leave his wife for two months, in April, immediately after the forty days' fast that Caroline scrupulously observes. Early in June, therefore, madame expected her husband, she expected him day by day. From one hope to another, "Conceived every morn and deferred every eve." She got along as far as Sunday, the day when her presentiments, which had now reached a state of paroxysm, told her that the longed-for husband would arrive at an early hour. When a pious woman expects her husband, and that husband has been absent from home nearly four months, she takes much more pains with her toilet than a young girl does, though waiting for her first betrothed. This virtuous Caroline was so completely absorbed in exclusively personal preparations, that she forgot to go to eight o'clock mass. She proposed to hear a low mass, but she was afraid of losing the delight of her dear Adolphe's first glance, in case he arrived at early dawn. Her chambermaid--who respectfully left her mistress alone in the dressing-room where pious and pimpled ladies let no one enter, not even their husbands, especially if they are thin--her chambermaid heard her exclaim several times, "If it's your master, let me know!" The rumbling of a vehicle having made the furniture rattle, Caroline assumed a mild tone to conceal the violence of her legitimate emotions. "Oh! 'tis he! Run, Justine: tell him I am waiting for him here." Caroline trembled so that she dropped into an arm-chair. The vehicle was a butcher's wagon. It was in anxieties like this that the eight o'clock mass slipped by, like an eel in his slime. Madame's toilet operations were resumed, for she was engaged in dressing. The chambermaid's nose had already been the recipient of a superb muslin chemise, with a simple hem, which Caroline had thrown at her from the dressing-room, though she had given her the same kind for the last three months.