"No, no! dear Brother Medardus," said Cyrillus, "not till after I have confessed my manifold crimes, and, in the first place, those which I have through inadvertence committed against you; not till after you have, according to the holy institutes of our church, reconciled me with Heaven, dare I speak any farther as to my own earthly misery, and worldly cares. You already know, that I myself, as well as all the rest of our community, looked upon you as the most hardened and most unpardonable of sinners. According to our belief, you had, by a continued chain of errors, heaped up the most enormous guilt on your head, so that we expelled you from our society. Yet your chief crime was but in yielding to the impulse of one fatal moment, in which the devil cast his noose round your neck, and dragged you away from the holy sanctuary, into the distractions of this sinful world. "Then an abominable swindler, assuming your name, your dress, and, as if he were the devil incarnate, also your corporeal figure, committed those crimes, which had almost drawn upon you the shameful death of a murderer. It has indeed been proved against you, that you have on one occasion sinned, inasmuch as you wished to break your monastic vows; but that you are unstained by those enormities which were imputed to you, there can be no doubt. Return then to our convent, Medardus, where the brethren will receive him whom they believed for ever lost, with redoubled kindness and rejoicing." Here the old man, overcome by weakness, sank back, fainting on his couch; and resisting the excitement which his words had produced upon me, I remembered that my present duty was to attend to Cyrillus only, and the welfare of his soul, which he had intrusted to my care. Therefore I laboured as well as I could, by friction, and raising him in the bed, to recover the unhappy prisoner from his insensibility. At last he was restored, and went regularly through his confession; he, the pious and almost blameless old man, humbling himself before me, the depraved sinner! But when I absolved the self-accusing monk, whose only fault seemed to be that he had on many subjects _doubted_, and by these doubts had been driven hither and thither, it seemed to me as if, notwithstanding my own manifold offences, a divine spirit were kindled up within me--as if I were but the unworthy instrument, the corporeal organ, by which Omnipotence spoke temporally to souls not yet released from their temporal bondage. "Oh, Brother Medardus," said Cyrillus, lifting his eyes full of devotion to Heaven, "how have your words refreshed and strengthened me! Gladly shall I now go to meet death, which the traitors residing here have prepared for me. I fall a victim to that abominable treachery and concealed wickedness, by which the throne of the Pope is now surrounded.----" I heard hollow sounding steps, that always came nearer and nearer. Then keys rattled in the door-lock.