“Well, follow me.”

So saying, the priest took her arm.

The unhappy girl was frozen to her very soul. Yet that hand produced an impression of cold upon her.

“Oh!” she murmured, “‘tis the icy hand of death. Who are you?”

The priest threw back his cowl; she looked. It was the sinister visage which had so long pursued her; that demon’s head which had appeared at la Falourdel’s, above the head of her adored Phoebus; that eye which she last had seen glittering beside a dagger.

This apparition, always so fatal for her, and which had thus driven her on from misfortune to misfortune, even to torture, roused her from her stupor.