He sank back in his chair, overwhelmed with sorrow and remorse, and silent tears rolled slowly down his cheeks.
“He is saved!” thought the abbe, whose heart bled at the sight of such despair. Suddenly someone plucked him by the sleeve.
It was Jean Lacheneur, and he drew the priest into the embrasure of a window.
“What is this about a child?” he asked, harshly.
A flood of crimson suffused the brow of the priest.
“You have heard,” he responded, laconically.
“Am I to understand that Marie-Anne was the mistress of Maurice, and that she had a child by him? Is this true? I will not—I cannot believe it! She, whom I revered as a saint! Did her pure forehead and her chaste looks lie? And he—Maurice—he whom I loved as a brother! So, his friendship was only a mask assumed to enable him to steal our honor!”
He hissed these words through his set teeth in such low tones that Maurice, absorbed in his agony of grief, did not overhear him.
“But how did she conceal her shame?” he continued. “No one suspected it—absolutely no one. And what has she done with her child? Appalled by a dread of disgrace, did she commit the crime committed by so many other ruined and forsaken women? Did she murder her own child?”
A hideous smile curved his thin lips.