My orders were
that he was to be imprisoned 'in secret.'"

Monsieur le Cure had this room. There was a revelation in those words.
It was all explained now. The priest had always had a love for animals
(and for ugly, common animals) which his pupil had by no means shared.
His room at the chateau had been little less than a menagerie. He had
even kept a glass beehive there, which communicated with a hole in the
window through which the bees flew in and out, and he would stand for
hours with his thumb in the breviary, watching the labors of his pets.
And this also had been his room! This dark, damp cell. Here, breviary in
hand, he had stood, and lain, and knelt. Here, in this miserable prison,
he had found something to love, and on which to expend the rare
intelligence and benevolence of his nature. Here, finally, in the last
hours of his life, he had written on the fly-leaf of his prayer-book
something to comfort his successor, and "being dead yet spoke" the words
of consolation which he had administered in his lifetime. Monsieur the
Viscount read that paper now with different feelings.

There is perhaps no argument so strong, and no virtue that so commands
the respect of young men, as consistency. Monsieur the Preceptor's
lifelong counsel and example would have done less for his pupil than was
effected by the knowledge of his consistent career, now that it was
past. It was not the nobility of the priest's principles that awoke in
Monsieur the Viscount a desire to imitate his religious example, but the
fact that he had applied them to his own life, not only in the time of
wealth, but in the time of tribulation and in the hour of death. All
that high-strung piety--that life of prayer--those unswerving
admonitions to consider the vanity of earthly treasures, and to prepare
for death--which had sounded so unreal amidst the perfumed elegancies of
the chateau, came back now with a reality gained from experiment. The
daily life of self-denial, the conversation garnished from Scripture and
from the Fathers, had not, after all, been mere priestly affectations.
In no symbolic manner, but, literally, he had "watched for the coming of
his Lord," and "taken up the cross daily;" and so, when the cross was
laid on him, and when the voice spoke which must speak to all, "The
Master is come, and calleth for thee," he bore the burden and obeyed the
summons unmoved.

_Unmoved!_--this was the fact that struck deep into the heart of
Monsi