ave Holland at once, and spend years of
his life in some distant convent before returning to it. By that time
the temptations of earthly passion would be doubly baffled; and older
and a better monk, he should be more master of his earthly affections,
and Margaret, seeing herself abandoned, would marry, and love another,
The very anguish this last thought cost him showed the self-searcher and
self-denier that he was on the path of religious duty.

But in leaving her for his immortal good and hers, he was not to
neglect her temporal weal. Indeed, the sweet thought, he could make her
comfortable for life, and rich in this world's goods, which she was not
bound to despise, sustained him in the bitter struggle it cost him to
turn his back on her without one kind word or look, "Oh, what will she
think of me?" he groaned. "Shall I not seem to her of all creatures the
most heartless, inhuman? but so best; ay, better she should hate me,
miserable that I am, Heaven is merciful, and giveth my broken heart this
comfort; I can make that villain restore her own, and she shall never
lose another true lover by poverty. Another? Ah me! ah me! God and the
saints to mine aid!"

How he fared on this errand has been related. But first, as you may
perhaps remember, he went at night to shrive the hermit of Gouda. He
found him dying, and never left him till he had closed his eyes and
buried him beneath the floor of the little oratory attached to his cell.
It was the peaceful end of a stormy life. The hermit had been a soldier,
and even now carried a steel corselet next his skin, saying he was now
Christ's soldier as he had been Satan's. When Clement had shriven him
and prayed by him, he, in his turn, sought counsel of one who was dying
in so pious a frame, The hermit advised him to be his successor in this
peaceful retreat. "His had been a hard fight against the world, the
flesh, and the devil, and he had never thoroughly baffled them till he
retired into the citadel of Solitude."

These words and the hermit's pious and peaceful death, which speedily
followed, and set as it were the seal of immortal truth on them, made a
deep impression upon Clement. Nor in his case had they any prejudice to
combat; the solitary recluse was still profoundly revered in the Church,
whether immured as an anchorite or anchoress in some cave or cell
belonging to a monastery, or hidden in the more savage but laxer
seclusion of the independent hermitage. And Clemen