The monastery; The abbot.

318 WAVERLEY NOVELS.
ceasing regret, and it seemed as if the latter could hardly bo the subject of
unmixed self-congratulation. He remembered this person, who had stood
to him in the relation of a mother, as equally affectionate in her attention,
and absolute in her authority. A singular mixture of love and fear attended
upon his early remembrances as they were connected with her; and the
fear that she might desire to resume the same absolute control over his
motions-a fear which her conduct of yesterday did not tend much to dissipate —weighed heavily against the joy of this second meeting.
"She cannot mean," said his rising pride, " to lead and direct me as a
pupil, when I am at the age of judging of my own actions?-this she
cannot mean, or meaning it, will feel herself strangely deceived."
A sense of gratitude towards the person against whom his heart thus
rebelled, checked his course of feeling. He resisted the thoughts which
involuntarily arose in his mind, as he would have resisted an actual instigation of the foul fiend; and, to aid him in his struggle, he felt for his
beads. But, in his hasty departure from the Castle of Avenel, he had
forgotten and left them behind him.
"This is yet worse," he said; "but two things I learned of her under
the most deadly charge of secrecy-to tell my beads, and to conceal that I
did so; and I have kept my word till now; and when she shall ask me for
the rosary, I must say I have forgotten it I Do I deserve she should believe
me when I say I have kept the secret of my faith, when I set so light by
its symbol?"
He paced the floor in anxious agitation. In fact, his attachment to his
faith was of a nature very different from that which animated the enthusiastic matron, but which, notwithstanding, it would have been his last
thought to relinquish.
The early charges impressed on him by his grandmother, had been instilled into a mind and memory of a character peculiarly tenacious. Child
as he was, he was proud of the confidence reposed in his discretion, and
resolved to show that it had not been rashly intrusted to him. At the same
time, his resolution was no more than that of a child, and must, necessarily,
have gradually faded away under the operation both of precept and
example, during his residence at the Castle of Avenel, but for the exhortaons of Father Ambrose, who, in his lay estate, had been called Edward
Glendinning. This zealous monk had been apprized, by an unsigned letter
placed-in his hand by a pilgrim, that a child educated in the Catholic faith
was now in the Castle of Avenel, perilously situated, (so was the scroll
expressed,) as ever the three children who were cast into the fiery furnace
of persecution. The letter threw upon Father Ambrose the fault, should
this solitary lamb, unwillingly left within the demesnes of the prowling
wolf, become his final prey. There needed no farther exhortation to the
monk than the idea that a soul might be endangered, and that a Catholic
might become an apostate; and he made his visits more fiequent than usual
to the castle of Avenel, lest, through want of the private encouragement
and instruction which he always found some opportunity of dispensing, the
church should lose a proselyte, and, according to the Romish creed, the
devil acquire a soul.
Still these interviews were rare; and though they encouraged the solitary
boy to keep his secret and hold fast his religion, they were neither frequent
nor long enough to inspire him with any thing beyond a blind attachment
to the observances which the priest recommended. He adhered to the
forms of his religion rather because he felt it would be dishonourable to
change that of his fathers, than from any rational conviction or sincere
belief of its mysterious doctrines. It was a principal part of the distinction
which, in his own opinion, singled him out from those with whom he lived,
and gave him an additional, though an internal and concealed reason, for
contemlning those of the household who showed an undisguised dislike of