Mamzelle Fleurette had been confessing for many years to old Father Fochelle. In his secret heart he often thought it a waste of 277his time and her own that she should come with her little babblings, her little nothings to him, calling them sins. He felt that a wave of the hand might brush them away, and that it in a manner compromised the dignity of holy absolution to pronounce the act over so innocent a soul.  
To-day she had whispered all her shortcomings into his ear through the grating of the confessional; he knew them so well! There were many other waiting to be heard, and he was about to dismiss her with a hasty when she arrested him, and in hesitating, accents told him of her love for the locksmith, the husband of another woman. A slap in the face would not have startled Father Fochelle more forcibly or more painfully. What soul was there on earth, he wondered, so hedged about with as to be secure from the machinations of Satan! Oh, the thunder of indignation that upon Mamzelle Fleurette’s head! She bowed down, beaten to earth beneath it. Then came questions, one, two, three, in quick succession, that made Mamzelle Fleurette and clutch blindly before her. Why was 278she not a shadow, a , that she might dissolve from before those angry, eyes; or a small insect, to creep into some and there hide herself forevermore?
 
“Oh, father! no, no, no!” she , “he knows nothing, nothing. I would die a hundred deaths before he should know, before anyone should know, besides yourself and the good God of whom I pardon.”
 
Father Fochelle breathed more freely, and mopped his face with a flaming bandana, which he took from the ample pocket of his soutane. But he scolded Mamzelle Fleurette roundly, unpityingly; for being a fool, for being a sentimentalist. She had not committed mortal sin, but the occasion was ripe for it; and look to it she must that she keep Satan at bay with and prayer. “Go, my child, and sin no more.”
 
Mamzelle Fleurette made a détour in her home by which she would not have to pass the locksmith’s shop. She did not even look in that direction when she let herself in at the glass door of her store.
 
Some time before, when she was yet ignorant of the which prompted the act, 279she had cut from a newspaper a of Lacodie, who had served as foreman of the jury during a prominent murder trial. The likeness happened to be good, and quite did justice to the locksmith’s fine physiognomy with its leonine . This picture Mamzelle Fleurette had kept hitherto between the pages of her prayer book. Here, twice a day, it looked out at her; as she turned the leaves of the holy mass in the morning, and when she read her evening devotions before her own little home altar, over which hung a crucifix and a picture of the Empress Eugénie.
 
Her first action upon entering her room, even before she unpinned the dotted veil, was to take Lacodie’s picture from her prayer book and place it at ^{<............}