He had learned to love Heinz as the saint had formerly loved him, and he did not grudge him the happiness which, at the knight’s age, had fallen to the lot of the man whose years now numbered eighty.  How long he had been permitted to enjoy this bliss!  True, during the last decades it had been clouded by many a shadow.

He had endured much hardship in the service of his sacred cause, but the greater the sacrifice he offered the more exquisite was the reward reaped by his soul.  Oh, if this pilgrimage might yield him Heinz Schorlin’s vow to follow his saint and with him the Saviour!—­if he might be permitted, clasping in his the hand of the beloved youth he had saved, to exchange this world for eternal bliss!

Earth had nothing more to offer; for he who was one of the leaders of his brotherhood beheld with grief their departure from the paths of their founder.  Poverty, which secures freedom to the body, which knows nothing of the anxieties of this world and the burden of possession, which permits the soul to soar unfettered far above the dust—­poverty, the divine bride of St. Francis, was forsaken in many circles of his brother monks.  With property, ease and the longing for secular influence had stolen into many a monastery.  Many shunned the labour which the saint enjoined upon his disciples, and the old jugs were often filled with new wine, which he, Benedictus, never tasted, and which the saint rejected as poison.  He was no longer young and strong enough to let his grief and indignation rage like a purifying thunderstorm amidst these abuses.

But Heinz Schorlin!

If this youth of noble blood, equally gifted in mind and person, whom Heaven itself had summoned with lightning and thunder, devoted himself from sincere conviction, with a heart full of youthful enthusiasm, to his sacred cause—­if Heinz, consecrated by him, and fully aware of the real purposes of the saint, who, also untaught and rich only in knowledge of the heart, had begun a career so momentous in consequences, announced himself as a fearless champion of St. Francis’s will, then the St. George had been found who was summoned to slay the dragon, and with his blood instil new life at last into the monasteries of Germany, then perhaps the fresh prosperity which he desired for the order was at hand.  The larger number of its recruits came from the lower ranks of the people.  Sir Heinz Schorlin’s example would perhaps bring it also, as an elevating element, the sons of his peers.

So, bathed in perspiration, and often on the point of fainting, he followed Heinz through the dust of the highway.

Often, when his strength failed, and he sat down by the roadside to take breath, his soul-life gained a loftier aspiration.