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Abbe Constantin: Monsieur

Going directly to Jean, she cried, "Oh, how glad I am you are here." Then she took both his hands in hers and, addressing the cure, she said, "I have come to beg you, Monsieur le Cure, to listen to my confession." And to herself she was saying, "I wish to be loved! I wish to love! I wish to be happy and to make him happy! And since he cannot have the courage to say it, I must have the courage for both!" "I am rich, Monsieur le Cure," she continued, aloud, "very rich, but I love money most for the good which it allows me to do. So I have the care of this money, and I have always wished that my husband should be worthy of sharing this great fortune in order that he should help me make good use of it. I thought of another thing, too--'He who will be my husband must be some one I can love!' There is a man who has done all he can to conceal from me that he loves me, but I do not doubt that he loves me. You do love me, Jean?" "Yes," said Jean, in a low voice, his eyes cast down, looking like a criminal, "I do love you." "I knew it very well, but I wanted to hear you say it. And now, Jean, I say to you, 'I love you!' Do not come near me, yet. Before I came here I thought I had a good stock of courage, but you see I have no longer my fine composure of a minute ago. And now, Monsieur le Cure, I want you to answer me, not him. Tell me, if he loves me and feels me worthy of my love, should he not agree to be my husband?" "Jean," said the old priest, gravely, "marry her; it is your duty." And as Jean took Bettina in his arms the girl continued: "You have often told me, Monsieur le Cure, that Jean was almost like your own son. Now you will have two children, that is all."

A month later Bettina, in the simplest of wedding-dresses, entered the church. The old cure said mass. Jean and Bettina knelt before him. He pronounced the benediction. Then floated from the organ the same reverie of Chopin's which Bettina had played the first time she had entered that village church where was to be consecrated the happiness of her life.

And this time it was Bettina who wept.