d honest, but dull as a pool on a winter's
highway.

Catherine would fain have had the one youth a soldier and the other a
saint, and of the two ambitions she most cherished the latter. The first
made shipwreck on the rustic Aimery, and therefore the second burned
more fiercely. She had the promise from the saints that her line had a
great destiny, and the form of it she took to be sanctitude. For, all
her married days she had ruled her life according to the canons of God,
fasting and praying, cherishing the poor, tending the afflicted, giving
of her great wealth bountifully to the Church. She had a name for
holiness as far as the coasts of Italy. Surely from the blood of
Beaumanoir one would arise to be in dark times a defender of the Faith,
a champion of Christ whom after death the Church should accept among the
beatified. Such a fate she desired for her seed more hungrily than any
Emperor's crown.

In the younger, Philip, there was hope. He had been an odd child, slim
and pale while Aimery was large and ruddy, shy where his brother was
bold and bold where he was shy. He was backward in games and unready in
a quarrel, but it was observed that he had no fear of the dark, or of
the Green Lady that haunted the river avenue. Father Ambrose, his tutor,
reported him of quick and excellent parts, but marred by a dreaminess
which might grow into desidia that deadly sin. He had a peculiar grace
of body and a silken courtesy of manner which won hearts. His grey
eyes, even as a small boy, were serious and wise. But he seemed to dwell
aloof, and while his brother's moods were plain for all to read, he
had from early days a self-control which presented a mask to his little
world. With this stoicism went independence. Philip walked his own
way with a gentle obstinacy. "A saint, maybe," Father Ambrose told his
grandmother. "But the kind of saint that the Church will ban before it
blesses."

To the old dame of Beaumanoir the child was the apple of her eye;
and her affection drew from him a tenderness denied to others. But it
brought no confidences. The dreaming boy made his own world, which
was not, like his grandmother's, one of a dark road visited rarely by
angels, with heaven as a shining city at the end of it; or, like his
brother's, a green place of earthy jollity. It was as if the Breton
blood of the Lavals and Rohans had brought to the solid stock of
Beaumanoir the fairy whimsies of their dim ancestors. While the moors
and