might find his way into farmhouse or humble presbytery of its
scattered townships. And as for those who kept up the central
tradition of their house, they were true to the soil, coming back,
under whatever obstacles, from court, from cloister, from distant
crusade, to the visible spot where the memory of their kindred was
liveliest and most exact--a memory, touched so solemnly with a
conscience of the intimacies of life, its significant events, its
contacts and partings, that to themselves it was like a second sacred
history.

It was a great day, amid all their quiet days, for the people of
Deux-manoirs--one of the later days of August. The event, which
would mark it always in the life of one of them, called into play all
that was most expressive in that well-defined family character: it
was at once the recognition of what they valued most in past years,
and an assertion of will, or hope, for the [5] future, accordant
thereto. Far away in Paris the young King Charles the Ninth, in his
fourteenth year, had been just declared of age. Here, in the church
of Saint Hubert, church of their parish, and of their immemorial
patronage, though it lay at a considerable distance from their abode,
the chiefs of the house of Latour, attended by many of its dependents
and less important members, were standing ready, around the last hope
of their old age--the grandparents, their aged brothers and sisters,
certain aged ecclesiastics of their kindred, wont to be called to the
family councils.

They had set out on foot, after a votive mass said early in the old
chapel of the manor, to assist at the ceremony of the day.
Distinguishable from afar by unusual height in proportion to its
breadth within, the church of Saint Hubert had an atmosphere, a