CHAPTER XXIX
THE FIRST PROMOTION
The Forerunner.
Julien had not emerged from the deep reverie in which the episode in the cathedral had plunged him, when the severe abbé Pirard summoned him.
"M. the abbé Chas-Bernard has just written in your favour. I am on the whole sufficiently satisfied with your conduct. You are extremely imprudent and irresponsible without outward signs of it. However, up to the present, you have proved yourself possessed of a good and even generous heart. Your intellect is superior. Taking it all round, I see in you a spark which one must not neglect.
"I am on the point of leaving this house after fifteen years of work. My crime is that I have left the seminarists to their free will, and that I have neither protected nor served that secret society of which you spoke to me at the Confessional. I wish to do something for you before I leave. I would have done so two months earlier, for you deserve it, had it not been for the information laid against you as the result of the finding in your trunk of Amanda Binet's address. I will make you New and Old Testament tutor. Julien was transported with gratitude and evolved the idea of throwing himself on his knees and thanking God. He yielded to a truer impulse, and approaching the abbé Pirard, took his hand and pressed it to his lips.
"What is the meaning of this?" exclaimed the director angrily, but Julien's eyes said even more than his act.
The abbé Pirard looked at him in astonishment, after the manner of a man who has long lost the habit of encountering
