Fra Angelo and his nephew were silent for a few moments. The monk was absorbed by the bitter yet glorious memories of his younger days. Michel gazed at him with delight; and, no longer wondering at the martial air and muscular strength concealed beneath the frock, mused with the admiration of an artist upon the strange poesy of that life of devotion to a single idea. If there was something abnormal and, to a certain extent, entertaining in the history of the Capuchin, who still boasted of his life as a bandit and seriously regretted it, there was something truly noble in the way in which the ex-brigand preserved his individual dignity, compromised as it had been in such extraordinary adventures. Dagger or crucifix in hand, slaying traitors in the forest or begging for the poor at the gates of palaces, he was always the same, proud, ingenuous, unbending in his ideas, seeking to do good by the most vigorous methods, detesting cowardly acts with such intensity that he was still quite capable of punishing them with his own hand, utterly unable to understand the selfish motives by which the world is governed, or to believe that any man would not be ready at any moment to attempt the impossible rather than palter with the expedients suggested by cold circumspection. "Why do you admire the secondary hero of my story?" he said to his nephew when he emerged from his reverie. "Self-sacrifice and patriotism must amount to something in your eyes, for that man had no other motive, and, in the present state of society, would have been only a poor fool--perhaps a lunatic." "Yes, uncle, sincere devotion and the sacrifice of one's whole individuality to an idea are noble things, and if I had known you in those days--if I had been a man grown--I should probably have followed you into the mountains. I might have been less devotedly attached than you were to the Prince of Castro-Reale, but I trust I should have had the same illusions and the same love for the cause of my country." "Really, young man?" said Fra Angelo, fixing his penetrating eyes upon Michel's face. "Really, uncle," the young man replied, proudly raising his head, and sustaining that searching glance with the assurance of conviction. "And is it too late now to attempt anything, my poor boy?" said Fra Angelo, with a sigh. "Has the time passed when we can believe in the triumph of the truth, and is the new society, which I have had no better chance to study in my cloister than in my bandit's cave, determined to allow itself to be crushed forever?"