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At that moment, bowed down, the father entered the distinguished gathering-place. At this spectacle of unmerited woe, everyone rose. There are some sorrows before which one does not try to proffer consolation. Silently everyone came up to shake the hand of the deserving old man, to give discreet evidence of their sharing his misfortune.

Olympe withdrew, pale and shamefaced. For an instant, with the sense of guilt in her heart, she had hesitated, on the point of throwing herself into the arms of the family and of friendship, ever open to repentance. But passion had carried her away. A first love throws down into the heart deep-spreading roots which will stifle earlier sentiments, even to their smallest germs.

All the same, the shock of the scandal had dealt a shattering blow to Olympe’s personality. Her tortured conscience rose in revolt, and next day a fever seized her. She took to her bed. Quite literally she died of shame. The physical was slain by the moral. The sheath was worn out by the blade.

Lying in her tiny room, and feeling that the hour of her passing was at hand, she called out. Some good souls among the neighbours brought her a heavenly minister. One of them let fall the remark that Olympe was very weak, and ought to be fortified. Whereupon a maid-of-all-work brought up some soup for her.

The priest appeared.

The old ecclesiastic strove to calm her with words of peace, forgetfulness, and forgiveness.

“I have had a lover…” murmured Olympe, using these words to accuse herself of her disgrace.

She omitted all the peccadilloes, the complainings, the impatience of her life. That, and that only, came to her mind. It obsessed her.”A lover!For pleasure!Without a penny of gain!” There lay the crime.

She was not concerned to whittle away her transgression by telling of her former life, always up till then pure and full of self-denial. In all that, she felt certain, she was beyond reproach. But to have succumbed to this shame, to have faithfully cherished a love for a youth who had no position and, in the truthful and avenging words of her sister, never gave her so much as a brass farthing!Henriette, who had never yielded, appeared to her as crowned with a halo. She felt herself condemned, and dreaded already the thunder-bolts of the All-powerful Judge, face to face with whom she might now at any moment be standing.

The priest, used to all the woes of humanity, attributed to delirium certain points in Olympe’s confessions which seemed to him to be inexplicable, diffuse even. There was in this perhaps a quid pro quo, certain of the poor girl’s expressions having once or twice left the abbe wondering. But as repentance, remorse, was his sole concern, the detail of the sin mattered little; the good-will of the penitent and her sincere grief—these were enough. And at the very moment when he was about to raise his hand to grant the absolution, the door burst noisily open: it was Maxime, glowing, with a joyful, beaming air, with a handful of a few silver crowns and three or four gold pieces which he was tossing and jingling triumphantly. His family had raised the money on the occasion of his examinations: it was for his entrance….

At first Olympe did not notice this significant and extenuating circumstance. She threw out her arms towards him, with horror.

Maxime had stopped short, stupefied at what he saw before him.

“Courage, my daughter!” murmured the priest, who read in this gesture of Olympe’s a final farewell to her partner in guilty and immodest joys.

In reality it was only the young man’s crime that she was thrusting from her—and the crime was that of not being “serious.”

But on the instant when the august pardon was descending upon her, a heavenly smile lit up her innocent features: the priest imagined that she felt herself saved, that through the mortal shadows of these last moments there shone for her some dim seraphic vision. But in reality Olympe had just caught sight, vaguely, of the pieces of the sacred metal gleaming between the transfigured fingers of Maxime. Then, and only then, did she experience the life-giving effects of the supreme forgiveness!A veil was rent asunder. A miracle! By this manifest sign she saw herself pardoned from on high, and ransomed.

Dazzled, with conscience set at rest, she closed her eyelids as if to gather strength before spreading her wings towards the everlasting blue. Then her lips were parted, and like the perfume of a lily her last breath issued forth, murmuring the words of hope—” It has grown light!”