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“You are like ice. Lie down, cover yourself up, and get warm.”
    Will you believe, brothers, that I was weeping! It was not pity. The tears flowed of themselves down my cheeks, though I felt only an immense and vague sadness.
    The girl’s words had made a deep impression on me. Her argument, the force of which, doubtless, escaped her, seemed to me just and true. I realized so perfectly that she had her rights, that I could not have driven her away without thinking myself the incarnation of injustice. She was a woman still, and I could not treat her like a lifeless object which contempt and abandonment cannot affect. Setting all else aside, humanity demanded that I should help her. The pure and the guilty are both liable to come to us, some winter night, to tell us that they are cold, that they are hungry, that they have need of us. Alas! we often receive the one and thrust the other into the gloomy and inhospitable street!
    This is because we have the cowardice of our vices. It is because we would be terrified to have beside us a living remembrance and remorse. It pleases us to live honored, and when we blush at the call of some wretched creature, we deny her to explain our blushes by her impudence. And we do this without deeming ourselves culpable, without asking ourselves what justice this creature demands. Custom has made us consider her a disgrace, and we are astonished that this disgrace speaks and calls itself a woman.
     
    My friends, I trembled before the truth. I understood and I wept. The question seemed to me simple, clear and self-evident. Laurence’s words had frightened without disgusting me. I had not dreamed of her coming; but she came and I received her. I cannot, brothers, explain to you what were my feelings. My mind of twenty years had accepted in their absolute sense those words which admitted of no hesitation: “You are mine and I am yours!”
    The next morning, when I awoke and found Laurence in my room, I felt my heart ready to burst with anguish. The scene of the past night was effaced. I no longer heard the true and rude words which had made me receive the girl. The brutal fact alone remained.
    I looked at her as she slept. I saw her for the first time by daylight, without her face having the strange beauty of suffering or despair. When she thus appeared to me, ugly and prematurely old, plunged into a heavy, brutish slumber, I trembled before that faded and common countenance which I did not recognize. I could not comprehend how it was that I had awakened in such company. I seemed as if I had come out of a dream, and the reality proved so horrible that I had forgotten what had made me accept it.
    But what difference did it make whether it was pity, justice or mercy. The girl was there. Ah! brothers, can I shed enough tears, and will you have sufficient courage to dry them!

CHAPTER VIII.
    A MISSION FROM ON HIGH.
    YES, I think as you do; I wish still to hope, I wish to make this fatal union a source of noble aspirations.
    Formerly, when our thoughts drifted, towards such unfortunate creatures as Laurence, we felt only mercy and pity for them. We discerned the holy task of redemption. We asked God to send us a dead soul, that we might, by kindly and gentle ways, restore it to youth and purity.
    The faith of our sixteenth year, we thought, ought to make sinners believe and bow the head.
    Then, we were Didier, pardoning Marion and acknowledging her as a wife at the foot of the scaffold. We lifted the sinner to the height of our tenderness.
    Well, now I can be Didier. Marion, as sinful as the day he pardoned her, is here. She needs the white robe of purity, a hand to guide her wavering steps aright, to steady her in the narrow and difficult path which leads to the happiness of innocence. Her pale face requires a pure atmosphere to restore to it the glow of youthful health. What we wished for in our sainted hallucinations I have found without searching for it.
    Since Laurence has come to me, I wish to