Nevertheless, this reasoning did not satisfy him.  Again, what of these millions?  Were they to be forever lost?  Then why so much waste of life?  Waste of life!  There is no such thing as waste of life—­ this much modern science the venerable Felix knew.  Nothing can be wasted,—­not a breath, not a scene, not a sound.  All is treasured up in Nature’s store-house and can be eternally reproduced at Nature’s will.  Then what was to become of the myriads of human beings and immortal souls whom the Church had failed to rescue?  The church had failed!  Why had it failed?  Whose the fault?—­whose the weakness?—­ for fault and weakness were existent somewhere.

“When the son of man cometh, think ye he shall find faith on earth?”

“No!” whispered the Cardinal, suddenly forced, as it were in his own despite, to contradict his former assertion—­“No!” He paused, and mechanically making his way towards the door of the Cathedral, he dipped his fingers into the holy water that glistened dimly in its marble basin near the black oak portal, and made the sign of the cross on brow and breast;—­“He will not find faith where faith should be pre-eminent.  It must be openly confessed—­repentingly admitted,—­He will not find faith even in the Church He founded,—­I say it to our shame!”

His head drooped, as though his own words had wounded him, and with an air of deep dejection he slowly passed out.  The huge iron-bound door swung noiselessly to and fro behind him,—­the grave-toned bell in the tower struck seven.  Outside, a tender twilight mellowed the atmosphere and gave brightness to approaching evening; inside, the long shadows, gathering heavily in the aisles and richly sculptured hollows of the side-chapels, brought night before its time.  The last votive candle at the Virgin’s shrine flickered down and disappeared like a firefly in dense blackness,—­the last echo of the bell died in a tremulous vibration up among the high-springing roof-arches, and away into the solemn corners where the nameless dead reposed,—­ the last impression of life and feeling vanished with the retreating figure of the Cardinal—­and the great Cathedral, the Sanctuary and House of God, took upon itself the semblance of a funeral vault,—­a dark, Void, wherein but one red star, the lamp before the Altar, burned.

II.

Lovely to a poet or an artist’s eye is the unevenly-built and picturesque square of Rouen in which the Cathedral stands,—­lovely, and suggestive of historical romance in all its remote corners, its oddly-shaped houses, its by-ways and crooked little flights of steps leading to nowhere, its gables and slanting roofs, and its utter absence of all structural proportion.  A shrine here, a broken statue there,—­a half-obliterated coat-of-arms over an old gateway,—­a