Page:The Czar, A Tale of the Time of the First Napleon.djvu/369

Rh sleeping in the Church of St. Alexander Nevsky at St. Petersburg, and God never gave him a son."

But Stéphanie's impatient voice was heard in the passage, so, after a tender little farewell to Clémence, Ivan escorted the ladies to a fiacre, and saw them depart.

The room where the meeting was held was crowded when they arrived. However, Coralie saw her cousin and Clémence seeking a place, and persuaded the governess who had charge of her party to make room for them. Clémence at first regretted this, for the girls began to chatter amongst themselves about their dress and other trifles in a way well calculated to put to flight all serious impressions.

Meanwhile she looked with much interest on the face and figure of the person about whom Ivan had told her so much. Perhaps on the whole she was disappointed: the worn and haggard features had in her eyes no charm save one, the charm of intense earnestness and utter sincerity. The thought passed through her mind, "That is a woman from whom I might learn much as a teacher, but I could never trust her as a guide." One thing, however, she learned that day—that the Pietists neither thought lightly of sin themselves, nor induced others to think lightly of it. The "Gray Sister of Hearts" (so Clémence remembered Ivan's calling Madame de Krudener) denounced in scathing accents just those sins of which the world thinks least—the sins of childhood. Conceit, selfishness, disobedience, forgetfulness of God, were exposed in terms that Clémence might have thought exaggerated, had she not remembered that the poison-seed is the poison-plant in embryo. Never before had she felt so thoroughly—

By-and-by the speaker's tone changed, and with a tenderness of look and manner of which Clémence felt all the charm, she