“It is this, monsieur.”  He spoke rapidly, lest his courage should go.  “That terrible train, with its brute of iron and live coals and foul smoke and screeching throat, has awakened my dead.  I guarded them with holy-water and they heard it not, until one night when I missed—­I was with madame as the train shrieked by shaking the nails out of the coffins.  I hurried back, but the mischief was done, the dead were awake, the dear sleep of eternity was shattered.  They thought it was the last trump and wondered why they still were in their graves.  But they talked together and it was not so bad at the first.  But now they are frantic.  They are in hell, and I have come to beseech you to see that they are moved far up on the hill.  Ah, think, think, monsieur, what it is to have the last long sleep of the grave so rudely disturbed—­the sleep for which we live and endure so patiently!”

He stopped abruptly and caught his breath.  The count had listened without change of countenance, convinced that he was facing a madman.  But the farce wearied him, and involuntarily his hand had moved towards a bell on the table.

“Ah, monsieur, not yet! not yet!” panted the priest.  “It is of the countess I came to speak.  I had forgotten.  She told me she wished to lie there and listen to the train go by to Paris, so I sprinkled no holy-water on her grave.  But she, too, is wretched and horror-stricken, monsieur.  She moans and screams.  Her coffin is new and strong, and I cannot hear her words, but I have heard those frightful sounds from her grave to-night, monsieur; I swear it on the cross.  Ah, monsieur, thou dost believe me at last!”

For the count, as white as the woman had been in her coffin, and shaking from head to foot, had staggered from his chair and was staring at the priest as if he saw the ghost of his countess.

“You heard—?” he gasped.

“She is not at peace, monsieur.  She moans and shrieks in a terrible, smothered way, as if a hand were on her mouth—­”

But he had uttered the last of his words.  The count had suddenly recovered himself and dashed from the room.  The priest passed his hand across his forehead and sank slowly to the floor.

“He will see that I spoke the truth,” he thought, as he fell asleep, “and to-morrow he will intercede for my poor friends.”

* * * * *

The priest lies high on the hill where no train will ever disturb him, and his old comrades of the violated cemetery are close about him.  For the Count and Countess of Croisac, who adore his memory, hastened to give him in death what he most had desired in the last of his life.  And with them all things are well, for a man, too, may be born again, and without descending into the grave.

IV

The Greatest Good of the
Greatest Number

Morton Blaine returned to New York from his brief vacation to find awaiting him a frantic note from John Schuyler, the man nearer to him than any save himself, imploring him to “come at once.”  The appeal was supplemented with the usual intimation that the service was to be rendered to God rather than to man.