ge.

The boys were all there, kneeling in their places. He knelt among them,
happy and shy. The altar was heaped with fragrant masses of white
flowers; and in the morning light the pale flames of the candles among
the white flowers were clear and silent as his own soul.

He knelt before the altar with his classmates, holding the altar cloth
with them over a living rail of hands. His hands were trembling and his
soul trembled as he heard the priest pass with the ciborium from
communicant to communicant.

--CORPUS DOMINI NOSTRI.

Could it be? He knelt there sinless and timid; and he would hold upon
his tongue the host and God would enter his purified body.

--IN VITAM ETERNAM. AMEN.

Another life! A life of grace and virtue and happiness! It was true. It
was not a dream from which he would wake. The past was past.

--CORPUS DOMINI NOSTRI.

The ciborium had come to him.

Chapter 4

Sunday was dedicated to the mystery of the Holy Trinity, Monday to the
Holy Ghost, Tuesday to the Guardian Angels, Wednesday to saint Joseph,
Thursday to the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Altar, Friday to the
Suffering Jesus, Saturday to the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Every morning he hallowed himself anew in the presence of some holy
image or mystery. His day began with an heroic offering of its every
moment of thought or action for the intentions of the sovereign pontiff
and with an early mass. The raw morning air whetted his resolute piety;
and often as he knelt among the few worshippers at the side-altar,
following with his interleaved prayer-book the murmur of the priest, he
glanced up for an instant towards the vested figure standing in the
gloom between the two candles, which were the old and the new
testaments, and imagined that he was kneeling at mass in the catacombs.

His daily life was laid out in devotional areas. By means of
ejaculations and prayers he stored up ungrudgingly for the souls in
purgatory centuries of days and quarantines and years; yet the
spiritual triumph which he felt in achieving with ease so many fabulous
ages of canonical penances did not wholly reward his zeal of prayer,
since he could never know how much temporal punishment he had remitted
by way of suffrage for the agonizing souls; and fearful lest in the
midst of the purgatorial fire, which differed from the infernal only in
that it was not everlasting, his penance might avail no more than a
drop of moisture, he drove his soul daily through