'Yes, I will bless you. But be careful, O my son, lest, as Aaron's rod was transformed into a serpent, by your own action my blessing becomes a curse.' His lordship knelt. The Prior blessed him. Then his lordship went to bed, though the straw pallet on which he cast himself could hardly, on that occasion at any rate, be described as a bed of rest. CHAPTER XXX THE ONE MAN--AND THE OTHER There were peas in his lordship's shoes: unboiled. For some time he had been arriving at the conclusion that he had no so whole-hearted a leaning towards the religious life as he had once imagined. The scrap of paper was the top brick; it crowned the edifice of his discontent. More, it supplied him with the necessary courage to confess his backsliding to his superior; that keen-sighted religious being perhaps better prepared for the confession than the penitent imagined. It is even possible that some expectation of the kind had always been part and parcel of the Prior's plans. The Marquis of Twickenham, who is at once a millionaire and a backboneless scamp, is not the kind of bird which often drops into the monastic draw-net, whether at home or abroad. When caught, he may be even more useful at the end of a piece of string than in a cell. Which explains the ease with which his lordship regained what he fondly hoped would be his liberty. The truth being that persons of his type are never free; owing to their habit of mistaking licence for liberty placing them in continual bondage to some one or something. There were peas in his lordship's shoes: unboiled. It is a fact that on the homeward way he proposed to treat himself, in Paris, to what he called a little amusement. Those peas spoilt all his pleasure. At the Moulin Rouge, while the ladies whirled their skirts and leered, and the music blared, the shadow of his monastic vigils obscured it all. Wherever he turned he saw the white Figure on the huge black cross, which had so often loomed down at him in the midnight darkness from over the altar in the chapel; against which, as the Prior said, in his frenzied fervour he had longed to dash his head. When, like a guilty thing, he stole from the unfestive revels he saw a priest standing on the pavement without; the sight of whom filled him with such unreasoning terror that he took to his heels and ran. Luck had always been against him. Not all the evil he had done had been brought to light, but he was convinced that a most unfair proportion had been dragged into the noontide glare. The majority of men go with even their trivial peccadilloes undiscovered to the grave. In his case seven dirty things out of every ten he did were sure to get him into trouble. Did a man promise him a thrashing, dodge though he might, he was sure to light upon that man at the very moment when he least desired his presence. An instance of which aggravating species of misfortune occurred upon his homeward way.