flat
upon the head, showed a poor constitution maintained by a frugal diet.
WILL made the power of this man.

Such were his personal distinctions. His short hands might have
indicated in another man a tendency to coarse pleasures, and perhaps
he had, like Socrates, conquered his temptations. His thinness was
ungraceful, his shoulders were too prominent, his knees knocked
together. The body, too much developed for the extremities, gave him the
look of a hump-backed man without a hump. In short, his appearance was
not pleasing. None but those to whom the miracles of thought, faith, art
are known could adore that flaming gaze of the martyr, that pallor of
constancy, that voice of love,--distinctive characteristics of this
village rector.

This man, worthy of the primitive Church, which exists no longer
except in the pictures of the sixteenth century and in the pages of
Martyrology, was stamped with the die of the human greatness which
most nearly approaches the divine greatness through Conviction,--that
indefinable something which embellishes the commonest form, gilds with
glowing tints the faces of men vowed to any worship, no matter what,
and brings into the face of a woman glorified by a noble love a sort of
light. CONVICTION is human will attaining to its highest reach. At once
both cause and effect, it impresses the coldest natures; it is a species
of mute eloquence which holds the masses.

Coming down from the altar the rector caught the eye of the Abbe Gabriel
and recognized him; so that when the bishop's secretary reached the
sacristy Ursule, to whom her master had already given orders, was
waiting for him with a request that he would follow her.

"Monsieur," said Ursule, a woman of canonical age, conducting the Abbe
de Rastignac by the gallery through the garden, "Monsieur Bonnet told me
to ask if you had breakfasted. You must have left Limoges very early
to get here by ten o'clock. I will soon have breakfast ready for you.
Monsieur l'abbe will not find a table like that of Monseigneur the
bishop in this poor village, but we will do the best we can. Monsieur
Bonnet will soon be in; he has gone to comfort those poor people, the
Tascherons. Their son has met with a terrible end to-day."

"But," said the Abbe Gabriel, when he could get in a word, "where is the
house of those worthy persons? I must take Monsieur Bonnet at once
to Limoges by order of the bishop. That unfortunate man will not be
executed to-day;