omatist should no
longer suit your ideas, you can still look about for some quiet spot,
like that pool of which you were speaking, and drown yourself; you will
only be as you are now, or a little more or a little less wretched and
dishonored."

"This is not like the Archbishop of Granada's homily," said Lucien as
they stopped to change horses.

"Call this concentrated education by what name you will, my son, for you
are my son, I adopt you henceforth, and shall make you my heir; it is
the Code of ambition. God's elect are few and far between. There is no
choice, you must bury yourself in the cloister (and there you very often
find the world again in miniature) or accept the Code."

"Perhaps it would be better not to be so wise," said Lucien, trying to
fathom this terrible priest.

"What!" rejoined the canon. "You begin to play before you know the rules
of the game, and now you throw it up just as your chances are best, and
you have a substantial godfather to back you! And you do not even care
to play a return match? You do not mean to say that you have no mind to
be even with those who drove you from Paris?"

Lucien quivered; the sounds that rang through every nerve seemed to come
from some bronze instrument, some Chinese gong.

"I am only a poor priest," returned his mentor, and a grim expression,
dreadful to behold, appeared for a moment on a face burned to a
copper-red by the sun of Spain, "I am only a poor priest; but if I had
been humiliated, vexed, tormented, betrayed, and sold as you have been
by the scoundrels of whom you have told me, I should do like an Arab of
the desert--I would devote myself body and soul to vengeance. I might
end by dangling from a gibbet, garroted, impaled, guillotined in your
French fashion, I should not care a rap; but they should not have my
head until I had crushed my enemies under my heel."

Lucien was silent; he had no wish to draw the priest out any further.

"Some are descended from Cain and some from Abel," the canon concluded;
"I myself am of mixed blood--Cain for my enemies, Abel for my friends.
Woe to him that shall awaken Cain! After all, you are a Frenchman; I am
a Spaniard, and, what is more, a canon."

"What a Tartar!" thought Lucien, scanning the protector thus sent to him
by Heaven.

There was no sign of the Jesuit, nor even of the ecclesiastic, about
the Abbe Carlos Herrera. His hands were large, he was thick-set and
broad-chested, evidently he possessed the