uoth my mother, quite emotionless.

The monk pushed back his stool and rose ere he replied. "I must," he
said, "or I am unworthy of the scapulary I wear. I must reprove this
unchristian act, or else am I no true servant of my Master."

She crossed herself with her thumb-nail upon the brow and upon the lips,
to repress all evil thoughts and evil words--an unfailing sign that she
was stirred to anger and sought to combat the sin of it. Then she spoke,
meekly enough, in the same cold, level voice.

"I think it is you who are at fault," she told him, "when you call
unchristian an act which was necessary to secure this child to Christ."

He smiled a sad little smile. "Yet even so, it were well you should
proceed with caution and with authority; and in this you have none."

It was her turn to smile, the palest, ghostliest of smiles, and even for
so much she must have been oddly moved. "I think I have," said she, and
quoted, "'If thy right hand offend thee, hack it off.'"

I saw a hot flush mount to the friar's prominent cheek-bones. Indeed, he
was a very human man under his conventual robe, with swift stirrings
of passion which the long habit of repression had not yet succeeded
in extinguishing. He cast his eyes to the ceiling in such a glance of
despair as left me thoughtful. It was as an invocation to Heaven to
look down upon the obstinate, ignorant folly of this woman who accounted
herself wise and who so garbled the Divine teaching as to blaspheme with
complacency.

I know that now; at the time I was not quite so clear-sighted as to read
the full message of that glance.

Her audacity was as the audacity of fools. Where wisdom, full-fledged,
might have halted, trembling, she swept resolutely onward. Before her
stood this friar, this teacher and interpreter, this man of holy life
who was accounted profoundly learned in the Divinities; and he told her
that she had done an evil thing. Yet out of the tiny pittance of her
knowledge and her little intellectual sight--which was no better than a
blindness--must she confidently tell him that he was at fault.

Argument was impossible between him and her. Thus much I saw, and I
feared an explosion of the wrath of which I perceived in him the signs.
But he quelled it. Yet his voice rumbled thunderously upon his next
words.

"It matters something that Gino Falcone should not starve," he said.

"It matters more that my son should not be damned," she answered him,
and with th