---"I remember how you hit upon
one which speaks rather for your ardor than your prudence. Do you forget
that you would be a Toridor,--you whose cheek grew pale and whose
heart sickened as my father's horse lay embowelled in the ring, and who
fainted outright when the bull's horns were driven into the barricade
near you. You a Toridor! A Toridor should have courage!" And as she
spoke, her eyes flashed with the fire of passion.

"Courage!" said the priest, in a voice almost guttural from emotion;
"and is there no other courage than the vulgar defiance of personal
danger,--the quality of the veriest savage and the merest brute in
creation? Is there nothing more exalted in courage than to face bodily
peril? Are all its instincts selfishness? What think you of the courage
of him who, in all the conscious strength of intellect, with powers to
win an upward way amongst the greatest and the highest, can stoop to a
life of poverty and neglect, can give up all that men strive for,--home,
affection, family, citizenship,----content to toil apart and alone,
----to watch, to fast, and pray, and think,----ay, think till the very
brain reels with labor,--and all this for a cause in which he is but a
unit! Courage! Tell me not of courage beside that of him who dares to
shake the strongest thrones, and convulses empires with his word, whose
counsels brave the might of armies, and dare even kings to controvert;
and, greatest of all, the courage that for a cause can risk salvation!
Yes, Lola, he who to save others hazards his own eternity! Have I not
done it?" cried he, carried away by an impetuous rush of feeling. "Have
I not overborne the truth and sustained the falsehood? Have I not
warped the judgments, and clouded the faculties, and misdirected the
aspirations of many who came to me for counsel, knowing that if there
might be evil now there would be good hereafter, and that for present
and passing sorrow there would be a glorious day of rejoicing? To this
end have I spoke Peace to the guilty man and Hope to the hardened! Not
for him, nor for me, but for the countless millions of the Church,--for
the mighty hosts who look to her for succor and consolation! This I call
courage!"

And he drew himself proudly up, and folded his arms on his breast with
an air of haughty composure; while the girl, awed by his manner, and
subdued by the impetuosity of his speech, gazed at him in half fear and
wonderment.

"Tell me of your father, Lola,"