He turned the key twice in the lock, and threw the portals open. To his
great regret, he saw only Gabriel on the steps, between Rodin and Father
d'Aigrigny. The notary, and Bathsheba, who had served them as a guide,
waited a little behind the principal group.

Samuel could not repress a sigh, as he stood bowing on the threshold,
and said to them: "All is ready, gentlemen. You may walk in."

CHAPTER XXIII. THE TESTAMENT.

When Gabriel, Rodin, and Father d'Aigrigny entered the Red Room, they
were differently affected. Gabriel, pale and sad, felt a kind of painful
impatience. He was anxious to quit this house, though he had already
relieved himself of a great weight, by executing before the notary,
secured by every legal formality, a deed making over all his rights of
inheritance to Father d'Aigrigny. Until now it had not occurred to the
young priest, that in bestowing the care upon him, which he was about
to reward so generously, and in forcing his vocation by a sacrilegious
falsehood, the only object of Father d'Aigrigny might have been to
secure the success of a dark intrigue. In acting as he did, Gabriel was
not yielding, in his view of the question, to a sentiment of exaggerated
delicacy. He had made this donation freely, many years before. He would
have looked upon it as infamy now to withdraw it. It was hard enough
to be suspected of cowardice: for nothing in the world would he have
incurred the least reproach of cupidity.

The missionary must have been endowed with a very rare and excellent
nature, or this flower of scrupulous probity would have withered
beneath the deleterious and demoralizing influence of his education; but
happily, as cold sometimes preserves from corruption, the icy atmosphere
in which he had passed a portion of his childhood and youth had
benumbed, but not vitiated, his generous qualities, which had indeed
soon revived in the warm air of liberty. Father d'Aigrigny, much paler
and more agitated than Gabriel, strove to excuse and explain his anxiety
by attributing it to the sorrow he experienced at the rupture of his
dear son with the Order. Rodin, calm, and perfectly master of himself,
saw with secret rage the strong emotion of Father d'Aigrigny, which
might have inspired a man less confiding than Gabriel with strange
suspicions. Yet, notwithstanding his apparent indifference, the socius
was perhaps still more ardently impatient than his superior for the
success of this important af