n possession of the faithful heart
which worshipped her, and the truth of that love and grief had been
shown in a manner which touched even me, as I listened.

Some years after Justine Marie's death, ruin had come on her house too:
her father, by nominal calling a jeweller, but who also dealt a good
deal on the Bourse, had been concerned in some financial transactions
which entailed exposure and ruinous fines. He died of grief for the
loss, and shame for the infamy. His old hunchbacked mother and his
bereaved wife were left penniless, and might have died too of want; but
their lost daughter's once-despised, yet most true-hearted suitor,
hearing of the condition of these ladies, came with singular
devotedness to the rescue. He took on their insolent pride the revenge
of the purest charity--housing, caring for, befriending them, so as no
son could have done it more tenderly and efficiently. The mother--on
the whole a good woman--died blessing him; the strange, godless,
loveless, misanthrope grandmother lived still, entirely supported by
this self-sacrificing man. Her, who had been the bane of his life,
blighting his hope, and awarding him, for love and domestic happiness,
long mourning and cheerless solitude, he treated with the respect a
good son might offer a kind mother. He had brought her to this house,
"and," continued the priest, while genuine tears rose to his eyes,
"here, too, he shelters me, his old tutor, and Agnes, a superannuated
servant of his father's family. To our sustenance, and to other
charities, I know he devotes three-parts of his income, keeping only
the fourth to provide himself with bread and the most modest
accommodations. By this arrangement he has rendered it impossible to
himself ever to marry: he has given himself to God and to his
angel-bride as much as if he were a priest, like me."

The father had wiped away his tears before he uttered these last words,
and in pronouncing them, he for one instant raised his eyes to mine. I
caught this glance, despite its veiled character; the momentary gleam
shot a meaning which struck me.

These Romanists are strange beings. Such a one among them--whom you
know no more than the last Inca of Peru, or the first Emperor of
China--knows you and all your concerns; and has his reasons for saying
to you so and so, when you simply thought the communication sprang
impromptu from the instant's impulse: his plan in bringing it about
that you shall come on such a d