Brilliant sunlight lit up the grey spires and threatening pinnacles of St. Malo. The back of the ancient fortress was hidden in white mist, but the houses which rose above the battlements facing the harbour, and the shops and little taverns near the quay, shone out in brightness, their windows glittering under the sky where straying clouds, driven by the wind, were melting, as they fled, into the all-encompassing blue ether. Some pigeons and wild gulls circled above the earthworks, darting down, at times, between the massive oak piles which, forced deep into the sand, were covered with shining seaweed. The piercing note of the military bugle, the crack of the cabmen's long whips, the clatter of wooden shoes, and the Angelus bells then chiming, made up a volume of sound which fell on Robert's ears with all the poignant strangeness of an old song heard again after many years. A hundred memories flocked into his mind at the first distant view of that familiar scene: memories of his boyhood, its errors, its visions, its ambitions; his revolt against nature as he understood it, and his desire to keep his heart and soul and senses for the service of God, and the custody of his own ideals. The very centre of his thoughts was here: here he had found the first beginnings of his faith and love. How often he had walked alone upon those ramparts with his New Testament and the _Morte d'Arthur_, striving, in the fervour of romantic sentiment, to combine the standards of knightly chivalry with the austere counsels of the gospel. The divinity of Christ is the object of eternal contemplations, and at every age--not of the world only, but of the individual--His Humanity, under our fresh knowledge, demands a different study and a fuller understanding. What changes, therefore, experience and suffering had wrought in those early, untried speculations! The ideals remained, but they made for swords, not peace; the sweetness of the dream had become an inflexible law of conscience; the doctrine of a transcendent disdain of this world, accepted in solitude by the obscure youth brought up in a provincial town, had exacted its tax to the uttermost farthing from the man who struggled now with the rich and powerful in a great city of the great universe of affairs.... He thought of his dead godmother, Madame Bertin, with her still, pale face and beautiful hands--a cold, blameless woman who had treated him kindly and misunderstood him always. She had been his father's friend; she had loved him, in her own stern, silent fashion, for his father's sake. O, if she might only know now how much he treasured every impression he had formed of her strong character! She had given him all the tenderness she had, and all the motherly influence his childhood had received. What might his life have been without that early association with a noble if somewhat restricted nature? But these and similar thoughts, while they went deep, passed