Page:Magician 1908.djvu/157

 her was a priest in the confessional. A little peasant girl, in a Breton coiffe, perhaps a maid-servant lately come from her native village to the great capital, passed in and knelt down. Margaret could hear her muttered words and at intervals the deep voice of the priest. In three minutes she tripped neatly away. She looked so fresh in her plain black dress, so healthy and innocent, that Margaret could not restrain a sob of envy. The child had so little to confess, a few puny errors which must excite a smile on the lips of the gentle priest, and her candid spirit was like snow. Margaret would have given anything to kneel down and whisper in those passionless ears all that she suffered, but the priest’s faith and hers were not the same. They spoke a different tongue, not of the lips only, but of the soul, and he would not listen to the words of a heretic.

A long procession of seminarists came in from the college, which is under the shadow of that great church, two by two, in black cassocks and short white surplices. Many were tonsured already. Some were quite young. Margaret watched their faces, wondering if they were tormented by such agony as she. But they had a living faith to sustain them, and if some plainly were narrow and obtuse, they had at least a fixed rule which prevented them from swerving into treacherous byways. One or two had a wan ascetic look, such as the saints may have had when the terror of life was known to them only in the imaginings of the cloister. The canons of the church followed in their more gorgeous vestments and finally the officiating clergy.