Page:Georges Eekhoud - Escal Vigor, a novel.djvu/75

Rh This miraculous tree would have been a fitting subject for one of those small figures of the Virgin, placed under glass, on a miniature altar, which simple folk set up, with an astonishing instinct, in the most romantic places in their parishes. This little eminence reminds one of the open air oratory nearby which Joan of Arc heard her "voices."

Little Blandine presented from the most tender age a strange mixture of exalted feeling and intelligence, of sentiment and reason. She had been brought up in the Catholic religion, but, from the days of her catechism had ever refused the strict letter to cleave only to the spirit which gives life.

As she grew older she identified the idea of God with conscience. This may be enough to show that so long as she held the faith her religion had nothing in it of bigotry or cant, but was of a generous and chivalrous character. In Blandine a poetic disposition and fancy was united to a large and honest sense of life. Brave and clever, if she had the imagination of a good fairy, she also had a fairy's industrious fingers.

A woman to-day, controlling the economy of a lordly domain, she looks back upon