Oh, thrice ignoble varlet! To pose with unctuous hypocrisy before people who had welcomed him under their roof, unquestioned, with all the grace and kindliness of English hospitality! To lie shamelessly in the face of his old fellow-student, who had been so genuinely glad to meet him again! Yet such possibility had not been unforeseen.

At the times of his profound gloom, when solitude and desire crushed his spirit, he had wished that fate would afford him such an opportunity of knavish success.

His imagination had played with the idea that a man like himself might well be driven to this expedient, and might even use it with life-long result.

Of a certainty, the Church numbered such men among her priests,--not mere lukewarm sceptics who made religion a source of income, nor yet those who had honestly entered the portal and by necessity were held from withdrawing, though their convictions had changed; but deliberate schemers from the first, ambitious but hungry natures, keen-sighted, unscrupulous.

And they were at no loss to defend themselves against the attack of conscience.