'No,' said De Narbonne, sulkily; 'my blessing you shall never have. My advice I give you, as you once gave me yours. I warn you that shortly all you constitutional bishops will be anathematised by Rome, all the priests will be ordered, on pain of excommunication, to abstain from acknowledging you, and the faithful will be forbidden to accept the ministrations of bishops and priests who have taken this accursed oath, at the risk of damning their souls eternally.' 'My God!' exclaimed Lindet. 'Yes, such will be the action of the holy see.' 'Then,' said Lindet, vehemently, 'if that be the conduct of the successor of S. Peter, it is high time that his supremacy should be modified into a primacy; lest at some future occasion, relying on powers he has assumed, he use them to wreck the Church. We have just upset the principle of absolute monarchy in the field of politics, we must overthrow the same principle in the domain of religion.' He turned from the ex-bishop, and entering the palace, shut himself into the library and wrote a letter to the pope, imploring him to use caution, and not, on a point of trifling consequence--the disendowment of the Church--to wreck Christianity in the whirlpool of the Revolution. It need hardly be said that his letter remained unanswered, and that the prognostications of the ex-bishop were verified. CHAPTER XLI. In 1816, just twenty-seven years after Corporal Deschwanden's death, as related in the last chapter but one, on a still summer evening, a little party sat in the veranda of a brown timber-built house at Kreutzmatt above Lucerne. The veranda was simply one of three open galleries overgrown with vine-branches, common to Swiss houses in the Four Cantons. Against this gallery, over the door, leading into the house from the garden, was a painting, of no high type of art, representing a tall man with dark hair, and a face of deadly pallor, the eyes sunk and red with weeping; habited in a snuff-coloured garb, with loose sleeves and no collar, holding in one hand a staff. Under this painting was written in German characters, 'Heiliger Bruder Klaus, bitte für uns.' Looking from the veranda, the eye swept across the goodly city of Lucerne, its quaint watchtowers capped with red tiles, and the twin taper spires of S. Leger; across the still blue lake, unruffled, like a gigantic mirror, to Pilatus, its serrated crest flushed with red evening light, crisply cutting the evening sky. To the right was the rolling green country stretching towards the setting sun; but to the left, above the water, towered the glistening peaks of the Engelberg Alps, their glaciers blazing in the last fires of day.