he austere counsels of the gospel. The
divinity of Christ is the object of eternal contemplations, and at every
age--not of the world only, but of the individual--His Humanity, under
our fresh knowledge, demands a different study and a fuller
understanding. What changes, therefore, experience and suffering had
wrought in those early, untried speculations! The ideals remained, but
they made for swords, not peace; the sweetness of the dream had become
an inflexible law of conscience; the doctrine of a transcendent disdain
of this world, accepted in solitude by the obscure youth brought up in a
provincial town, had exacted its tax to the uttermost farthing from the
man who struggled now with the rich and powerful in a great city of the
great universe of affairs.... He thought of his dead godmother, Madame
Bertin, with her still, pale face and beautiful hands--a cold, blameless
woman who had treated him kindly and misunderstood him always. She had
been his father's friend; she had loved him, in her own stern, silent
fashion, for his father's sake. O, if she might only know now how much
he treasured every impression he had formed of her strong character!
She had given him all the tenderness she had, and all the motherly
influence his childhood had received. What might his life have been
without that early association with a noble if somewhat restricted
nature? But these and similar thoughts, while they went deep, passed
swiftly and did not return again till a very different moment, when they
came with agony and remained for ever.

He and Brigit were the last to leave the boat. They had been so happy
there that, by an instinct, they lingered behind the others, unwilling
to break the enchantment of their isolation from the land, and
half-dreading the unknown trials, or joys, which awaited, surely enough,
their first steps upon the soil. As they crossed the plank they looked
back, obeying a common impulse, at the deserted deck. Their chairs had
already been moved away, and the leeward corner, which had seemed so
much their own, was filled up by a small group of sailors who were
quarrelling about the division of _pourboires_. The drive to Miraflores
is long and winding, past several small villages, and approached finally
through a large tract of fields and orchards. But for the changing
crimson of the vines, it might have been August weather. Robins,
however, were singing, and the golden, brown, and russet butterflies of
autumn