you do not
even care to play a return match? You do not mean to say that you have
no mind to be even with those who drove you from Paris?"

Lucien quivered; the sounds that rang through every nerve seemed to
come from some bronze instrument, some Chinese gong.

"I am only a poor priest," returned his mentor, and a grim expression,
dreadful to behold, appeared for a moment on a face burned to a
copper-red by the sun of Spain, "I am only a poor priest; but if I had
been humiliated, vexed, tormented, betrayed, and sold as you have been
by the scoundrels of whom you have told me, I should do like an Arab
of the desert--I would devote myself body and soul to vengeance. I
might end by dangling from a gibbet, garroted, impaled, guillotined in
your French fashion, I should not care a rap; but they should not have
my head until I had crushed my enemies under my heel."

Lucien was silent; he had no wish to draw the priest out any further.

"Some are descended from Cain and some from Abel," the canon
concluded; "I myself am of mixed blood--Cain for my enemies, Abel for
my friends. Woe to him that shall awaken Cain! After all, you are a
Frenchman; I am a Spaniard, and, what is more, a canon."

"What a Tartar!" thought Lucien, scanning the protector thus sent to
him by Heaven.

There was no sign of the Jesuit, nor even of the ecclesiastic, about
the Abbe Carlos Herrera. His hands were large, he was thick-set and
broad-chested, evidently he possessed the strength of a Hercules; his
terrific expression was softened by benignity assumed at will; but a
complexion of impenetrable bronze inspired feelings of repulsion
rather than attachment for the man.

The strange diplomatist looked somewhat like a bishop, for he wore
powder on his long, thick hair, after the fashion of the Prince de
Talleyrand; a gold cross, hanging from a strip of blue ribbon with a
white border, indicated an ecclesiastical dignitary. The outlines
beneath the black silk stockings would not have disgraced an athlete.
The exquisite neatness of his clothes and person revealed an amount of
care which a simple priest, and, above all, a Spanish priest, does not
always take with his appearance. A three-cornered hat lay on the front
seat of the carriage, which bore the arms of Spain.

In spite of the sense of repulsion, the effect made by the man's
appearance was weakened by his manner, fierce and yet winning as it
was; he evidently laid himself out to please Lucien,