g Maurice before she left; but he was unmoved by the
half-invitation; nothing could induce him to leave Paris while he
cherished the belief that Madeleine was within its walls.

Count Tristan wrote and urged him to return home; but the summons was
unheeded. He could not have endured, while his mind was in this terrible
state of incertitude, to behold again the old chateau, which must
conjure up so many harrowing recollections. Then, too, his natural
affection for his father and his grandmother was embittered by the
remembrance of their persecution of Madeleine. Until she had been
found,--until he could hear from her own lips (as he knew he should)
that she harbored no animosity towards them,--he could not force himself
to forgive their injustice and cruelty. She alone had power to soften
his heart and cement anew the broken link.

CHAPTER XII.

THE SISTER OF CHARITY.

The marvellous change in the bearing of Gaston de Bois, by which Maurice
was struck, had been wrought by a triad of agents. A man who had passed
his life in indolent seclusion, who had plunged into a tangled labyrinth
of abstruse books, not in search of valuable knowledge, but to lose in
its mazes the recollection of valueless hours; who had allowed his days
to drag on in aimless monotony; who had fallen into melancholy because
he lacked a healthy stimulus to rouse his faculties out of their
life-deadening torpidity; who had allowed his nervous diffidence to gain
such complete mastery over him that it tied his tongue, and clouded his
vision, and confused his brain; who had despised himself because he was
keenly conscious that his existence was purposeless and
profitless;--this man, subjected to the sudden impetus of an occupation
for which his mental acquirements and sedentary habits alike fitted him,
found his new life a revelation. He had emerged from the dusty, beaten,
grass-withered path his feet had spiritlessly trodden from earliest
youth, and entered a field of bloom and verdure where the very stir of
the atmosphere exhilarated, where the labor to be performed called
dormant capacities into play and tested their strength, where each day's
achievement gave the delightful assurance of latent powers within
himself hitherto unrecognized,--in a word, where his manhood was
developed through the regenerating virtue, the glorious might, the
blessed privilege of _work!_

The second cause which had contributed to bring about the happy
metamorpho