“Not for your nature,—­no!  You have made your body like a transparent scabbard through which the glitter of the soul-sword is almost visible.  But I am different.  I am so much of a materialist that I like to pull down Heaven to the warm bosom of Earth and make them mingle.  You would lift up Earth to Heaven!  Ah, that is difficult!  Even Christ came down!  It is the chief thing I admire in Him, that He ‘descended from Heaven and was made Man’.  TRES cher Felix, I shall bewilder you to death with my specious and frivolous reasoning,—­and after all, I had much better come to the main fact of what I intended to tell you,—­a sort of confession out of church.  You know I have already told you I am going to die soon, and that I am a bad man confessedly and hopelessly,—­but among other things is this, (and if you can give me any advice upon it I will take it,) that for the last four or five years I have been dodging about to escape being murdered,—­not because I particularly mind being murdered, because I probably deserve it,—­and one way of exit is as good as another,—­but because I want to save the would-be murderer from committing his crime.  Is not that a good motive?”

Cardinal Bonpre gazed at him in astonishment.  Vergniaud appeared to him in an entirely new light.  He had always known him as a careless, cynical-tempered man;—­a close thinker,—­a clever writer, and a brilliant talker,—­and he had been inclined to consider him as a “society” priest,—­one of those amiable yet hypocritical personages, who, by the most jesuitical flatteries and studied delicacies of manner, succeed in influencing weak-minded persons of wealth, (especially women) to the end of securing vast sums of money to the Church,—­obtaining by these means such rank and favour for themselves as would otherwise never have been granted to them.  But now the Abbe’s frank admission of his own sins and failings seemed a proof of his inherent sincerity,—­and sincerity, whether found in orthodoxy or heterodoxy, always commanded the Cardinal’s respect.

“Are you speaking in parables or in grave earnest?” he asked.  “Do you really mean that you are shadowed by some would-be assassin?  An assassin, too, whom you actually wish to protect?”

“Exactly!” And Vergniaud smiled with the air of one who admits the position to be curious but by no means alarming.  “I want to save him from the guillotine; and if he murders me I cannot!  It is a question of natural instinct merely.  The would-be assassin is my son!”

Cardinal Bonpre raised his clear blue eyes and fixed them full on the Abbe.

“This is a very serious matter,” he said gently, “Surely it is best to treat it seriously?”