"Virtuous, indeed, but not with the virtue of the religious.

He will never enter the Church.

He has drunk at headier streams." The Countess was nearing her end.

All her days, for a saint, she had been a shrewd observer of life, but with the weakening of her body's strength she had sunk into the ghostly world which the Church devised as an ante-room to immortality.

Her chamber was thronged with lean friars like shadows.