un, the rich coloring of autumn skies, having
no connection in his mind with any joyous recollection, left him cold and
unmoved; he even professed an almost hostile indifference to such purely
material sights as disturbing and dangerous to the inner life. He lived
within himself and could not see beyond.

His mind, imbued with a mystic idealism, delighted itself in solitary
reading or in meditations in the house of prayer. The only emotion he
ever betrayed was caused by the organ music accompanying the hymnal
plain-song, and by the pomp of religious ceremony.

At the age of eighteen, he left the St. Hilaire college in order to
prepare his baccalaureate, and his father, becoming alarmed at his
increasing moodiness and mysticism, endeavored to infuse into him the
tastes and habits of a man of the world by introducing him into the
society of his equals in the town where he lived; but the twig was
already bent, and the young man yielded with bad grace to the change of
regime; the amusements they offered were either wearisome or repugnant to
him. He would wander aimlessly through the salons where they were playing
whist, where the ladies played show pieces at the piano, and where they
spoke a language he did not understand. He was quite aware of his worldly
inaptitude, and that he was considered awkward, dull, and ill-tempered,
and the knowledge of this fact paralyzed and frightened him still more.
He could not disguise his feeling of ennui sufficiently to prevent the
provincial circles from being greatly offended; they declared unanimously
that young de Buxieres was a bear, and decided to leave him alone. The
death of his father, which happened just as the youth was beginning his
official cares, put a sudden end to all this constraint. He took
advantage of his season of mourning to resume his old ways; and returned
with a sigh of relief to his solitude, his books, and his meditations.
According to the promise of the Imitation, he found unspeakable joys in
his retirement; he rose at break of day, assisted at early mass,
fulfilled, conscientiously, his administrative duties, took his hurried
meals in a boardinghouse, where he exchanged a few polite remarks with
his fellow inmates, then shut himself up in his room to read Pascal or
Bossuet until eleven o'clock.

He thus attained his twenty-seventh year, and it was into the calm of
this serious, cloister-like life, that the news fell of the death of
Claude de Buxieres and of