ch
failed him. He could only stammer out his confession, "I am no longer
a Catholic, I am a Protestant, I cannot pray to the saints, not even to
the archangel St. Michel or the Blessed Virgin. I pray only to God."
For anything else, for explanation, and for all argument, he had no more
language than the mute, wistful language one sees in the eyes of dumb
creatures, when they gaze fully at us.

Perhaps there is nothing more pitiful than the painful want of words to
express that which lies deepest within us; a want common to us all,
but greatest in those who have had no training in thus shaping and
expressing their inmost thoughts.

There was not much to fear from a man like this. Michel Lorio was a
living lesson against apostasy. As he went up and down the street,
and in and out of the gate, his loneliness and dejection spoke more
eloquently for the old faith than any banishment could have done. Michel
was suffered to remain under a ban, not formal and ceremonial, but a
tacit ban, which quite as effectively set him apart, and made his life
more solitary than if he had been dwelling alone on a desert rock out at
sea.

Michel accepted his lot without complaint and without bitterness. He
never passed Monsieur le Cure without a salutation. When he went daily
for water to the great cistern of the monastery, he was always ready
to carry the brimful pails too heavy for the arms of the old women and
children. If he had leisure he mounted the long flights of grass-grown
steps three or four times for his neighbours, depositing his burden at
their doors, without a word of thanks for his help being vouchsafed to
him. Now and then he overheard a sneer at his usefulness; and his mother
taunted him often for his patience and forbearance. But he went on his
way silently with deeper yearning for human love and sympathy than he
could make known.

If it had not been that, when he was kneeling at the rude dormer-window
of his loft and gazing dreamily across the wide sweep of sand, with the
moon shining across it and the solemn stars lighting up the sky, he was
at times vaguely conscious of an influence, almost a presence, as of a
hand that touched him and a voice that spoke to him, he must have
sunk under this intense longing for love and fellowship. Had he been a
Catholic still, he would have believed that the archangel St. Michel was
near and about to manifest himself as in former times in his splendid
shrine upon the Mont. The new f