Rendered timid, she
dared not raise her eyes in the priest's presence, and ceased to have
any feeling but respect for her mother, whom up to that time she had
made a sharer in all her frolics. When she saw that beloved mother
turning her blue eyes towards her with an appearance of anger, a
religious terror took possession of the girl's heart.
Then suddenly the vision took her to the second period of her
childhood, when as yet she understood nothing of the things of life.
She thought with an almost mocking regret of the days when all her
happiness was to work beside her mother in the tapestried salon, to
pray in the church, to sing her ballads to a lute, to read in secret a
romance of chivalry, to pluck the petals of a flower, discover what
gift her father would make her on the feast of the Blessed Saint-John,
and find out the meaning of speeches repressed before her. Passing
thus from her childish joys through the sixteen years of her girlhood,
the grace of those softly flowing years when she knew no pain was
eclipsed by the brightness of a memory precious though ill-fated.
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