Julien bent forward
to see him, and ground his teeth as he watched his joyous departure. The
sharp sting of jealousy entered his soul, and he rebelled against the
evident injustice of Fate. How had he deserved that life should present
so dismal and forbidding an aspect to him? He had had none of the joys of
infancy; his youth had been spent wearily under the peevish discipline of
a cloister; he had entered on his young manhood with all the awkwardness
and timidity of a night-bird that is made to fly in the day. Up to the
age of twenty-seven years, he had known neither love nor friendship; his
time had been given entirely to earning his daily bread, and to the
cultivation of 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