There remained little time for further explanations. The refectory bell was ringing, and Cerise must hurry in and present herself for her ration of fruit and chocolate; to which refreshment, indeed, she seemed more than usually inclined. Neither her surprise nor her feelings had taken away her appetite, and she received her director’s benediction with a humility respectful, edifying, and filial, as if he had been her grandfather. “I shall perhaps not visit you at the convent again, my daughter,” he had said, revolving in his own mind a thousand schemes, a thousand impossibilities, tinged alike with fierce, bitter disappointment; and to this she had made answer meekly— “But you will think of me very often, my father; and, oh, remember me, I entreat of you, in your prayers!” Then Florian knew that the edifice he had taken such pains to rear was crumbling away before his eyes, because, in his anxiety to build it for his own habitation, he had laid its foundations in the sand. CHAPTER VII ST. MARK’S BALSAM The death of the great king, and the first transactions of the Regency, left little leisure to Abbé Malletort for the thousand occupations of his every-day life. With the busy churchman, to stagnate was a cessation of existence. As some men study bodily health and vigour, carefully attending to the development of their frames by constant and unremitting exercise, so did the Abbé preserve his intellect in the highest possible training by its varied use, and seemed to grudge the loss of every hour in which he either omitted to learn something new or lay a fresh stepping-stone for the employment of knowledge previously acquired. Like Juvenal’s Greek, he studied all the sciences in turn, but his labour was never without an object, nor had he the slightest scruples in applying its results to his own advantage. Malletort was qualified to deal with the most consummate knave, but he might have been unconsciously out-manœuvred by a really honest man, simply from his own habitual disregard of the maxim, as true in ethics as in mathematics, which teaches that the shortest way from any one given point to another is a straight line. The Abbé had therefore many irons in his fire, careful, however, so to hold them that he should preserve his own fingers from being burnt; and amongst others, he often applied his spare hours to the study of chemistry.