his spirit sank; for all these reasons he had
not a word to say, and seemed to Mr. Malcolm either stupid or close. He
could but wring warmly Mr. Malcolm's reluctant hand, and accompany him
down to the street-door.

CHAPTER X.

"This will never do," said Charles, as he closed the door, and ran
upstairs; "here is a day wasted, worse than wasted, wasted partly on
strangers, partly on friends; and it's hard to say in which case a more
thorough waste. I ought to have gone to the Convent at once." The
thought flashed into his mind, and he stood over the fire dwelling on
it. "Yes," he said, "I will delay no longer. How does time go? I declare
it's past four o'clock." He then thought again: "I'll get over my
dinner, and then at once betake myself to my good Passionists."

To the coffee-house then he went, and, as it was some way off, it is not
wonderful that it was near six before he arrived at the Convent. It was
a plain brick building; money had not been so abundant as to overflow
upon the exterior, after the expense of the interior had been provided
for. And it was incomplete; a large church had been enclosed, but it was
scarcely more than a shell,--altars, indeed, had been set up, but, for
the rest, it had little more than good proportions, a broad sanctuary, a
serviceable organ, and an effective choir. There was a range of
buildings adjacent, capable of holding about half-a-dozen fathers; but
the size of the church required a larger establishment. By this time,
doubtless, things are different, but we are looking back at the first
efforts of the English Congregation, when it had scarcely ceased to
struggle for life, and when friends and members were but beginning to
flow in.

It was indeed but ten years, at that time, since the severest of modern
rules had been introduced into England. Two centuries after the
memorable era when St. Philip and St. Ignatius, making light of those
bodily austerities of which they were personally so great masters,
preached mortification of will and reason as more necessary for a
civilized age,--in the lukewarm and self-indulgent eighteenth century,
Father Paul of the Cross was divinely moved to found a Congregation in
some respects more ascetic than the primitive hermits and the orders of
the middle age. It was not fast, or silence, or poverty which
distinguished it, though here too it is not wanting in strictness; but
in the cell of its venerable founder, on the Celian Hill, hangs