should only be able to see the end of his son's career from the
heavens, should it please God to call him there. He would die before
his son's triumph; but this did not sadden him, for the family
would remain to enjoy the victory and to give thanks to God for His
goodness.

Humanities, theology, canons, everything, the young man mastered with
an ease which surprised his masters, and they compared him to the
Fathers of the Church, who had attracted attention by their precocity.
He would very soon finish his studies, and they all predicted that his
Eminence would give him a professorship in the seminary, even before
he sang his first mass. His thirst for learning was insatiable, and it
seemed as though the library really belonged to him. Some evenings he
would go into the Cathedral to pursue his musical studies, and talk
with the Chapel-master and the organist, and at other times in the
hall of sacred oratory he would astound the professors and the Alumni
by the fervour and conviction with which he delivered his sermons.

"He is called to the pulpit," they said in the Cathedral garden. "He
has all the fire of the apostles; he will become a Saint Bernard or
a Bossuet. Who can tell how far this youth will go, or where he will
end?"

One of the studies which most delighted Gabriel was that of the
history of the Cathedral, and of the ecclesiastical princes who had
ruled it. All the inherent love of the Lunas for the giantess who was
their eternal mother surged up in him, but he did not love it blindly
as all his belongings did. He wished to know the why and the wherefore
of things, comparing in his books the vague old stories that he had
heard from his father, that seemed more akin to legends than to
historical facts.

The first thing that claimed his attention was the chronology of the
archbishops of Toledo--a long line of famous men, saints, warriors,
writers, princes, each with his number after his name, like the kings
of the different dynasties. At certain times they had been the real
kings of Spain. The Gothic kings in their courts were little more than
decorative figureheads that were raised or deposed according to the
exigencies of the moment. The nation was a theocratic republic, and
its true head was the Archbishop of Toledo.

Gabriel grouped the long line of famous prelates by characters. First
of all the saints, the apostles in the heroic age of Christianity,
bishops as poor as their own people, barefooted,