eemed that they had found much, but had had no joy of it, and that
they were still craving. It was a disease of the time and men called it
aegritudo. "No saint," the aged Ambrose told the Countess. "Virtuous,
indeed, but not with the virtue of the religious. He will never enter
the Church. He has drunk at headier streams." The Countess was nearing
her end. All her days, for a saint, she had been a shrewd observer of
life, but with the weakening of her body's strength she had sunk
into the ghostly world which the Church devised as an ante-room to
immortality. Her chamber was thronged with lean friars like shadows. To
her came the Bishop of Beauvais, once a star of the Court, but now in
his age a grim watch-dog of the Truth. To him she spoke of her hopes for
Philip.

"An Italianate scholar!" cried the old man. "None such shall pollute the
Church with my will. They are beguiled by such baubles as the holy Saint
Gregory denounced, poetarum figmenta sive deliramenta. If your grandson,
madame, is to enter the service of God he must renounce these pagan
follies."

The Bishop went, but his words remained. In the hour of her extremity
the vision of Catherine was narrowed to a dreadful antagonism of light
and darkness--God and Antichrist--the narrow way of salvation and a lost
world. She was obsessed by the peril of her darling. Her last act must
be to pluck him from his temptress. Her mood was fanned by the monks who
surrounded her, narrow men whose honesty made them potent.

The wan face on the bed moved Philip deeply. Tenderness filled his
heart, and a great sense of alienation, for the dying woman spoke a
tongue he had forgotten. Their two worlds were divided by a gulf which
affection could not bridge. She spoke not with her own voice but with
that of her confessors when she pled with him to do her wishes.

"I have lived long," she said, "and know that the bread of this world is
ashes. There is no peace but in God. You have always been the child of
my heart, Philip, and I cannot die at ease till I am assured of your
salvation.... I have the prevision that from me a saint shall be born.
It is God's plain commandment to you. Obey, and I go to Him with a quiet
soul."

For a moment he was tempted. Surely it was a little thing this, to
gladden the dying. The rich Abbey of Montmirail was his for the taking,
and where would a scholar's life be more happily lived than among its
cool cloisters? A year ago, when he had been in the