ensity of pain and certainty that if the Church herself would
not give her children to drink out of pure fountains, they would
not be hindered from drinking of poisoned springs, and thus draw
down upon themselves all manner of evils and diseases.

He had never doubted for a moment the pureness of the source from
which he himself drank. He was not blind to the imperfections many
and great of individuals in high places, and the corruptions which
had crept within the pale of the Church, but these appeared to him
incidental and capable of amendment. He never guessed at any deeper
poison at work far below, tainting the very waters at their source.
He was in all essential points an orthodox son of Rome; but he had
imbibed much of the spirit of the Oxford Reformers, of whom Colet
was at this time the foremost, and his more enlightened outlook
seemed to the blind and bigoted of his own order to savour
something dangerously of heresy.

He did not know himself seriously suspected. His conscience was too
clear, his devotion to the Church too pure, to permit of his easily
fearing unworthy suspicions. He knew himself no favourite with the
stately but self-indulgent Prior of Chadwater; knew that Brother
Fabian, whom he had once sternly rebuked for an act of open sin,
was his bitter enemy. But he had not greatly heeded this, strong in
his own innocence, and he had been far happier at Chad in the more
truly pure atmosphere of that secular house than in the so-called
sanctity of the cloister.

And now he found his own thoughts, aspirations, and yearnings
repeated in the mind of his favourite pupil, and he was confronted
by a problem more difficult to solve than any that had met him
before. In his own case he felt he had a compass to steer by--the
restraint and guidance of his vows and his habit to help him. But
how would it be with this ardent and imaginative boy? His mind was
struggling to free itself from artificial trammels. To what goal
might not that wish lead?

Earnestly he looked upon the bowed form at his feet, and in his
eyes there was a great compassion. But his lips pronounced, with
sternness and decision, the words of the heavy penance imposed, and
at the end of the prescribed formulas he raised the boy and looked
searchingly into his face.

"My son," he said, very gently yet very impressively, "remember
that the first sin that entered into the world was the sin of
disobedience. Remember that Satan's most powerful wea