gives you certain
tones and certain gestures that make my flesh creep. You are not
demonstrative, and yet, just now--when you handled that tract--my God!
I thought Lucifer smiled."

"Certainly I don't respect that tract--what then?"

"Not respect that tract? But it is the pure essence of faith, love,
charity! I thought it would touch you: in its gentleness, I trusted
that it could not fail. I laid it in your desk with a prayer: I must
indeed be a sinner: Heaven will not hear the petitions that come
warmest from my heart. You scorn my little offering. Oh, cela me fait
mal!"

"Monsieur, I don't scorn it--at least, not as your gift. Monsieur, sit
down; listen to me. I am not a heathen, I am not hard-hearted, I am not
unchristian, I am not dangerous, as they tell you; I would not trouble
your faith; you believe in God and Christ and the Bible, and so do I."

"But _do_ you believe in the Bible? Do you receive Revelation? What
limits are there to the wild, careless daring of your country and sect.
Pere Silas dropped dark hints."

By dint of persuasion, I made him half-define these hints; they
amounted to crafty Jesuit-slanders. That night M. Paul and I talked
seriously and closely. He pleaded, he argued. _I_ could not argue--a
fortunate incapacity; it needed but triumphant, logical opposition to
effect all the director wished to be effected; but I could talk in my
own way--the way M. Paul was used to--and of which he could follow the
meanderings and fill the hiatus, and pardon the strange stammerings,
strange to him no longer. At ease with him, I could defend my creed and
faith in my own fashion; in some degree I could lull his prejudices. He
was not satisfied when he went away, hardly was he appeased; but he was
made thoroughly to feel that Protestants were not necessarily the
irreverent Pagans his director had insinuated; he was made to
comprehend something of their mode of honouring the Light, the Life,
the Word; he was enabled partly to perceive that, while their
veneration for things venerable was not quite like that cultivated in
his Church, it had its own, perhaps, deeper power--its own more solemn
awe.

I found that Pere Silas (himself, I must repeat, not a bad man, though
the advocate of a bad cause) had darkly stigmatized Protestants in
general, and myself by inference, with strange names, had ascribed to
us strange "isms;" Monsieur Emanuel revealed all this in his frank
fashion, which knew not secretivenes