a devout feeling that he should, so far as it was humanly possible, endeavour to obey the Master whose doctrine he professed to follow.  This, it will be admitted, was a curious idea.  Considering the bold and blasphemous laxity of modern Christian customs, it was surely quite a fanatical idea.  Yet he had his own Church-warrant for such a rule of conduct; and chief among the Evangelic Counsels writ down for his example was Voluntary Poverty.  Yes!—­Voluntary Poverty,—­notwithstanding the countless treasures lying idle and wasted in the Vatican, and the fat sinecures enjoyed by bishops and archbishops; which things exist in direct contradiction and disobedience to the command of Christ.  Christ Himself lived on the earth in poverty,—­He visited only the poorest and simplest habitations,—­and never did He set His sacred foot within a palace, save the palace of the High Priest where He was condemned to die.  Much symbolic meaning did Cardinal Felix discover in this incident,—­and often would he muse upon it gravely.

“The Divine is condemned to die in all palaces,” he would say,—­“It is only in the glorious world of Nature, under the sunlit or starlit expanse of heaven, that the god in us can live; and it was not without some subtle cause of intended instruction to mankind that the Saviour always taught His followers in the open air.”

There was what might be called a palace hard by, to which Bonpre had been invited, and where he would have been welcome to stay as long as he chose,—­the house of the Archbishop of Rouen—­a veritable abode of luxury as compared with the Hotel Poitiers, which was a dingy little tumble-down building, very old, and wearing a conscious air of feebleness and decrepitude which was almost apologetic.  Its small windows, set well back in deeply hollowed carved arches had a lack-lustre gleam, as of very aged eyes under shelving brows,—­its narrow door, without either bolts or bars, hung half-aslant upon creaking rusty hinges, and was never quite shut either by day or night,—­yet from the porch a trailing mass of “creeping jenny” fell in a gold-dotted emerald fringe over the head of any way-worn traveller passing in,—­making a brightness in a darkness, and suggesting something not altogether uncheery in the welcome provided.  They were very humble folk who kept the Hotel Poitiers,—­ the host, Jean Patoux, was a small market-gardener who owned a plot of land outside Rouen, which he chiefly devoted to the easy growing of potatoes and celery—­his wife had her hands full with the domestic business of the hotel and the cares of her two children, Henri and Babette, the most incorrigible imps of mischief that ever lived in Rouen or out of it.  Madame Patoux, large of body, unwieldy in movement, but clean as a new pin, and with a fat smile of perpetual contentment on her round visage, professed to be utterly worn to death by the antics of these children of hers,—­but nevertheless she managed to grow stouter every day