On this book mark two flaming hearts were embroidered, and a cross sewn out of pearls; it was evidently a keepsake “from the world.” Satan tried to convince himself that it was childish to close the book the eleventh time. But the facts of the case are that he was ashamed to confess that he was not sufficiently emancipated mentally to be free of fear of the cross. He would not have confessed it himself, but I am confessing it for him strictly “sub rosa.”
In this Cloister a young monk lived. Shelley, that poetic interpreter of the human heart, would have named him Alastor, but here they called him Brother Cœlestin. His was a gentle, inspired dreamer's soul, certainly worthy of a better fate than to wither away between gray, desolate walls. He was not especially beloved in the Cloister, and yet he was so quiet, so devoted. He did not coquette for a flattering look from the Prior, and when he met the brothers in the long, gloomy halls, he called out his “Memento” to them humbly—in the spirit of the Scriptures, not in the spirit of hypocrisy, which was something he knew nothing about.
Why Cœlestin entered the Cloister it would not
