priest, however, had already turned away, and, walking into the
recess of a window, left the brother and sister free to talk unmolested.

"I scarcely like him, Kate," whispered Frank.

"You scarcely know him yet," she said, with a smile. "But when can you
come again to me,--to-morrow^ early?"

"I fear not We have a parade and a field-inspection, and then 'rapport'
at noon."

"Leave it to me, then, dear Frank," said she, kissing him; "I must try
if I cannot succeed with the 'Field' better than you have done."

"There's the recall-bugle," cried the boy, in terror; and, snatching up
his cap, he bounded from the room at once.

"A severe service,--at least, one of rigid discipline," said D'Esmonde,
with a compassionating expression of voice. "It is hard to say whether
it works for good or evil, repressing the development of every generous
impulse, as certainly as it restrains the impetuous passions of youth."

"True," said Kate, pointedly; "there would seem something of priestcraft
in their _regime_. The individual is nothing, the service everything."

"Your simile lacks the great element,--force of resemblance, Madame,"
said D'Esmonde, with a half smile. "The soldier has not, like the
priest, a grand sustaining hope, a glorious object before him. He
knows little or nothing of the cause in which his sword is drawn; his
sympathies may even be against his duty. The very boy who has just left
us,--noble-hearted fellow that he is,--what strange wild notions of
liberty has he imbibed! how opposite are all his speculations to the
stern calls of the duty he has sworn to discharge!"

"And does he dare--"

"Nay, Madame, there was no indiscretion on his part; my humble walk in
life has taught me that if I am excluded from all participation in the
emotions which sway my fellow-men, I may at least study them as they
arise, watch them in their infancy, and trace them to their fruit of
good or evil. Do not fancy, dear lady, that it is behind the grating of
the confessional only that we read men's secrets. As the physician gains
his knowledge of anatomy from the lifeless body, so do we learn the
complex structure of the human heart in the deathlike stillness of the
cell, with the penitent before us. But yet all the knowledge thus gained
is but a step to something further. It is while reading the tangled
story of the heart,--its struggles, its efforts, the striving after good
here, the inevitable fall back to evil there, the poor