For what was he to do now? “Repent!” the saint had answered: it was the sort of saying one expected of a saint, and indeed, from Hoprig, who was secure against eternity, such repartees were natural enough. The serene physician had prescribed, but who would compound, the remedy? Florian himself was ready to do anything at all reasonable about those irregularities which had remained unforgiven through, as he must respectfully point out to inquirers, no remissness of his; he quite sincerely wanted to spare Heaven the discomfort of having a Duke of Puysange in irrevocable opposition: but he did not clearly see how repentance was possible. The great majority of such offences as antedated, say, the last two years had, after putative atonements, gone out of his mind, just as one puts aside and forgets about receipted bills: he could not rationally be expected to repent for misdemeanors without remembering them. That was the deuce of having placed unbounded faith in this—somehow—ambiguous Hoprig and in Hoprig’s celestial attorneyship. Even such irregularities as Florian recalled seemed unprolific of actual repentance. Florian now comprehended that he—perhaps through a too careful avoidance of low company, perhaps, he granted, through a tinge of pharisaism,—had never needed to incite the funerals of any but estimable and honorable persons who were upon the most excellent footing with the Church. He could not, with his rigid upbringing, for one instant doubt that all these had passed from this unsatisfactory world to eternal bliss. He could not question that he had actually been the benefactor of these persons. The only thing he could be asked to repent of here was a benevolent action, and to do that was, to anyone of his natural kindliness, out of all thinking. His irregularities in the way of personal friendship, too, appeared, upon the whole, to have resulted beneficially. Girls and boys that he had raised from sometimes the most squalid surroundings, even rescuing them in some cases from houses of notorious ill fame, had passed from him to other friends, and had prospered. Louison had now her duke, Henri his prince, and little Sapho her princess of the blood royal,—and so it went. All were now living contentedly, in opulence, and they all entertained the liveliest gratitude for their discoverer. You could not repent of having given the ambitious and capable young a good start in life. Among Florian’s married friends of higher condition, among a host of marquises and duchesses and countesses, his passing had tinged the quiet round of matrimony with romance, had left a plenitude of pleasant memories, and not infrequently had improved the quality of that household’s progeny. Here too he had in logic to admit he had scattered benefactions, of which no kindly-hearted person could repent.