in the pulpit he made no compromise with the
spirit of concession, but in all ordinary matters of indifference or of
innocent pleasure he gave the rein to his instincts, and in regard to
art he was so full of its relations with religion that he would admit of
no divergence between the two. Art and religion might take great
liberties with each other, and both be the better for it, as he thought.

His thirteenth-century ideas led him into a curious experiment which was
quite in the thirteenth-century spirit. Catherine's insatiable spirit of
coquetry was to blame, although it was not with him that she coquetted.
Ready enough to try her youthful powers on most men, she had seemed to
recognize by instinct that Mr. Hazard did not belong to her. Yet she
could not rest satisfied without putting even him to some useful purpose
of her own.

During Hazard's visits to the scaffold, he sometimes took up a pencil
and drew. Once he drew a sketch of Wharton in the character of a monk
with his brush and pallet in his hands. Catherine asked what connection
there was between Mr. Wharton and a monastery.

"None!" replied Mr. Hazard; "but I like to think of church work as done
by churchmen. In the old days he would have been a monk and would have
painted himself among these figures on the walls."

Esther ventured to criticise Wharton's style; she thought it severe,
monotonous, and sometimes strained.

"Wharton's real notion of art," said Hazard, "is a volcano. You may be a
volcano at rest, or extinct, or in full eruption, but a volcano of some
kind you have got to be. In one of his violent moods he once made me go
over to Sicily with him, and dragged me to the top of Etna. It
fascinated him, and I thought he meant to jump into it and pull me after
him, but at that time he was a sort of used-up volcano himself."

"Then there is really something mysterious about his life?" asked
Catherine.

"Only that he made a very unhappy marriage which he dislikes to think
about," replied Hazard. "As an artist it did him good, but it ruined his
peace and comfort, if he ever had any. He would never have made the
mistake, if he had not been more ignorant of the world than any mortal
that ever drew breath, but, as I was saying, a volcano was like a
rattlesnake to him, and the woman he married was a volcano."

"What has become of her?" asked Esther.

"I have not dared to ask for years. No one seems to know whether she is
living or dead."

"Did he l