f religious exercises, which
consoled him in some measure for his apparently useless way of living.
Latterly, it is true, Fortune had seemed to smile upon him, by giving
him a little more money and liberty, but this smile was a mere mockery,
and a snare more hurtful than the pettinesses and privations of his past
life. The fickle goddess, continuing her part of mystifier, had opened
to his enraptured sight a magic window through which she had shown him
a charming vision of possible happiness; but while he was still gazing,
she had closed it abruptly in his face, laughing scornfully at his
discomfiture. What sense was there in this perversion of justice, this
perpetual mockery of Fate? At times the influence of his early education
would resume its sway, and he would ask himself whether all this
apparent contradiction were not a secret admonition from on high,
warning him that he had not been created to enjoy the fleeting pleasures
of this world, and ought, therefore, to turn his attention toward things
eternal, and renounce the perishable delights of the flesh?

"If so," thought he, irreverently, "the warning comes rather late, and
it would have answered the purpose better had I been allowed to continue
in the narrow way of obscure poverty!" Now that the enervating influence
of a more prosperous atmosphere had weakened his courage, and cooled
the ardor of his piety, his faith began to totter like an old wall. His
religious beliefs seemed to have been wrecked by the same storm which
had destroyed his passionate hopes of love, and left him stranded and
forlorn without either haven or pilot, blown hither and thither solely
by the violence of his passion.

By degrees he took an aversion to his home, and would spend entire days
in the woods. Their secluded haunts, already colored by the breath of
autumn, became more attractive to him as other refuge failed him. They
were his consolation; his doubts, weakness, and amorous regrets, found
sympathy and indulgence under their silent shelter. He felt less lonely,
less humiliated, less prosaic among these great forest depths, these
lofty ash-trees, raising their verdant branches to heaven. He found he
could more easily evoke the seductive image of Reine Vincart in these
calm solitudes, where the recollections of the previous springtime
mingled with the phantoms of his heated imagination and clothed
themselves with almost living forms. He seemed to see the young girl
rising from the