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Rh turbed in mind as the governess; for not only did the note of preparation and change in the chateau fore bode the breaking-up of a happy home to him, with the return to laborious and subservient duty, in, the cathedral at Marseilles; but his conscience, a good, strong, serviceable young conscience, troubled him with suggestions that the hatred, the despair, and the jealousy he had read during the last few hours upon the face of his pupil were, in good measure, referable to the perfect freedom in which the young man had ruled his own life, and pursued the love-affair whose interruption now threatened such disaster to all concerned.

"I have been a false steward, an unfaithful guardian. Monsieur le Comte has every right to send me back to my bishop in disgrace, a dishonored priest! I have been weak, timid, cowardly: I have allowed my pupil to lead me, instead of I him; and now—I know his temper; I know that of the vicomte; and mademoiselle, how will she choose?"

Half muttering, half thinking these, and a thousand phrases like them, the chaplain paced up and down the long half-lighted library, whither he had retreated from the frigid and insolent companionship of his master, and his master's son; his tall figure clad in the black soutane, now vanishing into the gloom at either end of the gallery, now showing spectrally in the vague circle of light shed by the two candles, which, mounted upon quaint twisted branches of lacquered brass, only served to make the gloomy hall more gloomy than total darkness. At one end of the library a door stood ajar,—a side-door, giving upon a