“To the little red house by the river I came when the short night fell. I broke the web for ever, I broke my heart as well. Michael and the Saints deliver My soul from the nethermost Hell!” —M. E. COLERIDGE, _Wilderspin_. The grey March afternoon was dwindling into dusk, a dusk of windless cloud. A little sunset afterglow stained the west, behind the leafless chestnuts, as Gilbert walked steadily along the rough and narrow lane, one of that network of intersecting pathways which only a Vendean born could comfortably traverse. He was making his way, by an unfrequented route, to the solitary little hostelry which, just over a week ago, he had appointed as a rendezvous for his cousin when the latter should return from Nantes. Since then he had changed his mind about sending him on a further errand; but the arrangement had not been cancelled, and he must at any rate meet Louis at the Etoile de Vendée. And perhaps the unfamiliar surroundings would help him in what he had to do. Gilbert de Chantemerle, unlike his father, had never found any real consolation in philosophy. Over against the solace which it offered he could always discern, set as in battle array, the challenge of the Christian life—of the lives of Christians. He lived himself in close contact with such a life, which—as his father had done—he admired and loved, but it troubled him with its perpetual question. He could not, like his father, walk placidly by Sébastien des Graves with his eyes on a different goal. Even from the tenantry towards whom he was so wise and so upright, to whose welfare he had sacrificed his own young ambitions, he was separated by a gulf which he knew to be impassable. It had not needed M. des Graves to tell him that he could not lead them, when the time came, in the spirit with which they would follow. If only he could! All the winter, since his return from Brittany, a longing had been budding in his heart. But the fulfilment of that longing demanded a miracle; in other words, it was impossible. How could he ever change his point of view, how pass from doubt to the certainty of faith? Mere desire, however vehement, will not transport one’s body from one adjacent point to another; how should it change the country of that immeasurably more tenacious thing, the soul?