They were all silent for a minute—­then the Princesse D’Agramont spoke again—­

“But—­Pardon me!  Then you were about to destroy all your own chances of the future in your wild impulse of this morning?”

“Oh, Madame, it was no wild impulse!  When a man takes an oath by the side of a dead woman, and that woman his mother, he generally means to keep it!  And I most resolutely meant to kill my father and make of myself a parricide.  But I considered my mother had been murdered too—­socially and morally—­and I judged my vengeance just.  If it had not been for the boy there—­” and he glanced at Manuel, “I should certainly have fulfilled my intention.”

“And then there would have been no Abbe Vergniaud, and no ’Gys Grandit,’” said the Princesse lightly, endeavouring to change the sombre tone of the conversation,—­“and the ‘Christian Democratic’ party would have been in sackcloth and ashes!”

“The Christian Democratic party!” echoed the Cardinal, “What do they mean?  What do they want?”

“Christianity, Monseigneur!  That is all!” replied Cyrillon, “All—­ but so much!  You asked me for my history—­will you hear it now?”

There was an immediate murmur of assent, and the group around Cardinal Bonpre were soon seated—­all save Manuel, who remained standing.  Angela sat on a cushion at her uncle’s feet, and her deep violet eyes were full of an eager, almost feverish interest which she could scarcely conceal; and the Abbe Vergniaud, vitally and painfully concerned as he was in the narrative about to be told, could not help looking at her, and wondering at the extraordinary light and beauty of her face thus transfigured by an excitation of thought.  Was she a secret follower of his son’s theories, he wondered?  Composing himself in his chair, he sat with bent head, marvelling as he heard the story of the bold and fearless and philosophic life that had sprung into the world all out of his summer’s romance with a little innocent girl, whom he had found praying to her guardian angel.

“It is not always ourselves,” began Cyrillon in his slow, emphatic, yet musical voice, “who are responsible for the good or the evil we may do in our lives.  Much of our character is formed by the earliest impressions of childhood—­and my earliest impressions were those of sorrow.  I started life with the pulse of my mother’s broken heart beating in me,—­hence my thoughts were sombre, and of an altogether unnatural character to a child of tender years.  We lived—­my mother and I—­in a small cottage on the edge of a meadow outside the quaint old city of Tours—­a meadow, full at all seasons, of the loveliest wild flowers, but sweetest in the springtime when the narcissi bloomed, lifting their thousand cups of sweet perfume like incense to the sky.  I used to sit among their cool green stems,—­thinking many thoughts, chief among which was a wonder why God had made my little mother so unhappy.  I heard afterwards that