below the white propriety of the youth, duly arrayed for dedication,
with the lighted candle in his right hand and the surplice folded
over his left shoulder, he might sorely have disturbed their placid
but somewhat narrow ruminations, with the germs of what was strange
to or beyond them. Certain of those shrewd old ecclesiastics had in
fact detected that the devout lad, so visibly impressed, was not
altogether after their kind; that, together with many characteristics
obviously inherited, he possessed--had caught perhaps from some
ancestor unrepresented here--some other potencies of nature, which
might not always combine so accordantly as to-day with the mental
requisites of an occasion such as this. One of them, indeed, touched
notwithstanding by his manifest piety just then, shortly afterwards
recommended him a little prayer "for peace" from the Vespers of the
Roman Breviary--for the harmony of his heart with itself; advice
which, except for a very short period, he ever afterwards followed,
saying it every evening of his life.

Yet it was the lad's own election which had led him to this first
step in a career that might take him out of the world and end the
race of [9] Latour altogether. Approaching their fourscore years,
and realising almost suddenly the situation of the young Gaston, left
there alone, out of what had been a large, much-promising, resonant
household, they wished otherwise, but did not try to change his
early-pronounced preference for the ecclesiastical calling. When he
determined to seek the clericature, his proposal made a demand on all
their old-fashioned religious sentiment. But the fund was a deep
one, and their acquiescence in the result entire. He might indeed
use his privilege of "orders" only as the stepping-stone to material
advancement in a church which seemed to have gone over wholly to the
world, and of which at that time one half the benefices were