lly saying. "Half-measures don't do for
him," and he zealously set a good example by frequently confessing and
communicating. Hardly a day passed now without the vicomte going to the
Fourvilles, either to shoot with the comte, who could not do without
him, or to ride with the comtesse regardless of rain and bad weather.

"They are riding-mad," remarked the comte; "but the exercise does my
wife good."

The baron returned to Les Peuples about the middle of November. He
seemed a different man, he had aged so much and was so low-spirited; he
was fonder than ever of his daughter, as if the last few months of
melancholy solitude had caused in him an imperative need of affection
and tenderness. Jeanne told him nothing about her new ideas, her
intimacy with the Abbe Tolbiac, or her religious enthusiasm, but the
first time he saw the priest, he felt an invincible dislike for him, and
when his daughter asked him in the evening: "Well, what do you think of
him?"

"He is like an inquisitor!" he answered. "He seems to me a very
dangerous man."

When the peasants told him about the young priest's harshness and
bigotry and the sort of war of persecution he waged against natural laws
and instincts, his dislike changed to a violent hatred. He, the baron,
belonged to the school of philosophers who worship nature; to him it
seemed something touching, when he saw two animals unite, and he was
always ready to fall on his knees before the sort of pantheistic God he
worshiped; but he hated the catholic conception of a God, Who has petty
schemes, and gives way to tyrannical anger and indulges in mean revenge;
a God, in fact, Who seemed less to him than that boundless omnipotent
nature, which is at once life, light, earth, thought, plant, rock, man,
air, animal, planet, god and insect, that nature which produces all
things in such bountiful profusion, fitting each atom to the place it is
to occupy in space, be that position close to or far from the suns which
heat the worlds. Nature contained the germ of everything, and she
brought forth life and thought, as trees bear flowers and fruit.

To the baron, therefore, reproduction was a great law of Nature, and to
be respected as the sacred and divine act which accomplished the
constant, though unexpressed will of this Universal Being; and he at
once began a campaign against this priest who opposed the laws of
creation. It grieved Jeanne to the heart, and she prayed to the Lord,
and implored h