"It is dreadful, Adaly, to doubt the free grace of God,--dreadful to trust in any offices of men, or in tithes of mint and anise and cumin,--dreadful to look anywhere for absolution from sin but in the blood of the Lamb. I have a conviction, my child," continued he, in a tone even more serious, "that the poor woman has not lived a pure life before God, or even before the world. Even at this supreme moment of her life, if it be such, I should be unwilling to trust you alone with her, Adaly." Adele, trembling,--partly with the chilling wind, and partly with an ill-defined terror of--she knew not what,--nestled more closely to the side of the old gentleman; and he, taking her little hand in his, as tenderly as a lover might have done, said,-- "Adaly, at least _your_ trust in God is firm, is it not?" "It is! it is!" said she. The house, as we have said, lay far out upon the river-road, within a strip of ill-tended garden-ground, surrounded by a rocky pasture. A solitary white-oak stood in the line of straggling wall that separated garden from pasture, and showed still a great crown of leaves blanched by the frosts, and shivering in the wind. An artemisia, with blackened stalks, nodded its draggled yellow blossoms at one angle of the house, while a little company of barn-door fowls stood closely grouped under the southern lea, with heads close drawn upon their breasts, idling and winking in the sunshine. The young mother of the vagrant little one who had attracted latterly so much of the solitary woman's regard received them with an awkward welcome. "Miss Arles is poorly, to-day," she said, "and she's flighty. She keeps Arthur" (the child) "with her. You hear how she's a-chatterin' now." (The door of her chamber stood half open.) "Arty seems to understand her. I'm sure I don't." Nor, indeed, did the Doctor, to whose ear a torrent of rapid French speech was like the gibberish of demons. He never doubted 't was full of wickedness. Not so Adele. There were sweet sounds to her ear in that swift flow of Provencal speech,--tender, endearing epithets, that seemed like the echo of music heard long ago,--pleasant banter of words that had the rhythm of the old godmother's talk. "Ah, you're a gay one! Now--put on your velvet cap--so. We'll find a bride for you some day--some day, when you're a tall, proud man. Who's your father, Arty? Pah! it's nothing. You'll make somebody's heart ache all the same,--eh, Arty, boy?" "Do you understand her, Miss Maverick?" says the mother. "Not wholly," said Adele; and the two visitors stepped in noiselessly. The child, bedizened with finery, was standing upon the bed where the sick woman lay, with a long feather from the cock's tail waving from his cap. Madame Arles, with the hot flush of the fever upon her, looked--saving the thinness--as she might have looked twenty years before. And as her flashing eye caught the newcomers, her voice broke out wildly again,--