tain of pink and gold
clouds, like a lovely dawn."

"Chaplain, what has come to you?" said Gabriel; "this is not very
Christian."

"No, but it is artistic," said the musician simply. "I do not trouble
myself much about religion, I believe what I was taught, and I have
never taken the trouble to inquire any further. Music alone occupies
me, of which someone has said 'that it will be the religion of the
future,' the purest manifestation of the ideal. Everything that is
beautiful delights me, and I believe in it as a work of God. 'I
believe in God and in Beethoven,' as his pupil said--and besides, how
much religion the grandeur of music contains! Do you know the last
quartet that Beethoven wrote? He felt he was dying, and he wrote on
the edge of the score this terrible question: 'Must it be?' and lower
down he added, 'Yes, it must be, it must be.' It was necessary to die,
even for such a genius to leave life, while he still carried in his
mind such glorious things, to pay the tribute of human renovation;
and then he wrote that lament, that farewell to life, whose greatness
cannot be equalled by any song, or by any words of religion."

The musician sat down to the harmonium, and for a long while played
that last lament of the genius, his sorrowful complaint on crossing
the threshold, not despairing and trembling through fear of the
unknown, but with a brave melancholy, sinking into the eternal shadow,
confident that nothing could obscure his genius.

These evenings of artistic communion in that corner of the sleepy
Cathedral drew the two men together with an ever increasing affection.
The musician talked, turning over his scores, or playing his
harmonium; the revolutionist listened silently, only interrupting his
friend by his painful cough. They were evenings of sweet sadness that
these two men spent together, one dreaming of leaving the stone prison
of the Cathedral to see the world, the other returning from life
wounded and breathless, content with the obscure repose of the
beautiful church, and guarding with prudent silence the secret of his
past. Art shone for them like the rays of the sun in the grey and
monotonous atmosphere of the Cathedral.

When they met in the early mornings in the cloister the conversation
between the two friends generally ran on the same lines.

"This evening, eh?" the Chapel-master would say mysteriously. "I have
some fresh music, we shall enjoy something new that I have been sent
to-d