At that she kissed me.  Not a whimper, although I am an only son and the name dies with me, the old name of which she was so beautifully proud!  She had hoped to see my son wear my father’s name and face and thus bring back the lost husband she had so greatly loved; she had prayed to see my children about her knees, and it must have cost her a frightful anguish to renounce these sweet and consoling dreams, these tender and human ambitions.  Yet she did so, smiling, and kissed me on the brow.

Three months later I entered the Church; and because I was the last De Rance, and twenty four, and the day was to have been my wedding-day, there fell upon me, sorely against my will, the halo of sad romance.

Endeared thus to the young, I suppose I grew into what I might call a very popular preacher.  Though I myself cannot see that I ever did much actual good, since my friends praised my sermons for their “fine Gallic flavor,” and I made no enemies.

But there was no rest for my spirit, until the Call came again, the Call that may not be slighted, and bade me leave my sheltered place, my pleasant lines, and go among the poor, to save my own soul alive.

That is why and how the Bishop, my old and dear friend, after long argument and many protests, at length yielded and had me transferred from fashionable St. Jean Baptiste’s to the poverty-stricken missionary parish of sodden laboring folk in a South Carolina coast-town:  he meant to cure me, the good man!  I should have the worst at the outset.

“And I hope you understand,” said he, sorrowfully, “that this step practically closes your career.  Such a pity, for you could have gone so far!  You might even have worn the red hat.  It is not hoping too much that the last De Rance, the namesake of the great Abbe, might have finished as an American cardinal!  But God’s will be done.  If you must go, you must go.”

I said, respectfully, that I had to go.

“Well, then, go and try it out to the uttermost,” said the Bishop.  “And it may be that, if you do not kill yourself with overwork, you may return to me cured, when you see the futility of the task you wish to undertake.”  But I was never again to see his kind face in this world.

And then, as if to cut me off yet more completely from all ties, as if to render my decision irrevocable, it was permitted of Providence that the wheel of my fortune should take one last revolution.  Henri Dupuis of the banking house which bore his name shot himself through the head one fine morning, and as he had been my guardian and was still the executor of my father’s estate, the whole De Rance fortune went down with him.  All of it.  Even the old house went, the old house which had sheltered so many of the name these two hundred years.  If I could have grieved for anything it would have been that.  Nothing was left except the modest private fortune long since secured to my mother by my father’s affection.  It had been a bridal gift, intended to cover her personal expenses, her charities, and her pretty whims.  Now it was to stand between her and want.