to have it
imitated by another under the same circumstances.

No! he was forever disgraced in his own eyes, when he remembered the
valiant John Leclerc; and it was not to be permitted that Victor Le Roy
should follow the example of the wool-comber in preference to that
he had given,--that politic, wise, blood-sparing, flesh--loving,
truth-depreciating, God-defrauding example.

Accordingly he lost no time in seeking Victor in his cell. It was the
very cell in which he himself had lately been imprisoned. Within those
narrow walls he had meditated, prayed, and made his choice. There he had
stood face to face with fate, with God, with Jesus, and had decided--not
in favor of the flogging, and the branding, and the glorious infamy.
There, in spite of eloquence and fervor and devotion, in spite of all
his past vows and his hopes, he had decided to take the place and part
of a timeserver;--for he feared disgrace and pain, and the hissing
and scoff and persecution, more than he feared the blasting anger of
insulted and forsaken Truth.

He found Victor within his cell, his bright face not overcast with
gloom, his eyes not betraying doubts, neither disappointed, astonished,
nor in deep dejection. The mood he deemed unfavorable for his special
word,--poor, deceived, self-deceiving Mazurier!

He was not merely surprised at these indications,--he was at a loss. A
little trepidation, doubt, suspicion would have better suited him. Alas!
and was _his_ hour the extremity of another's weakness, not in the
elevation of another's spiritual strength? Once when he preached the
Truth as moved by the Holy Ghost, it was not to the prudence or the
worldly wisdom of his hearers he appealed, but to the higher feelings
and the noblest powers of men. Then he called on them to praise God by
their faith in all that added to His glory and dominion. But now his
eloquence was otherwise directed,--not full of the old fire and
enthusiasm,--not trustful in God, but dependent on prudence, as though
all help were in man. He had to draw from his own experience now,
things new and old,--and was not, by confession of the result of such
experience, humiliated!

"You are under a mistake," was his argument. "You have not gone deep
into these matters; you have made acquaintance only with the agitated
surface of them." And he proceeded to make good all this assertion, it
was so readily proven! _He_ also had been beguiled,--ah, had he not? He
had been beguiled by