of love's holiness. Your image drove
out all the sin from my soul. The peace which half a year of penance, of
fasting and flagellation could not bring me, was brought me by my love
for you when it awoke. It was as a purifying fire that turned to ashes
all the evil of desires that my heart had held."

Her hand pressed mine. She was weeping softly.

"I was an outcast," I continued. "I was a mariner without compass,
far from the sight of land, striving to find my way by the light
of sentiments implanted in me from early youth. I sought salvation
desperately--sought it in a hermitage, as I would have sought it in
a cloister but that I had come to regard myself as unworthy of
the cloistered life. I found it at last, in you, in the blessed
contemplation of you. It was you who taught me the lesson that the world
is God's world and that God is in the world as much as in the cloister.
Such was the burden of your message that night when you appeared to me
on Monte Orsaro."

"O, Agostino!" she cried, "and all this being so can you refrain from
blaming me for what has come to pass? If I had but had faith in you--the
faith in the sign which we both received--I should have known all this;
known that if you had sinned you had been tempted and that you had
atoned."

"I think the atonement lies here and now, in this," I answered very
gravely. "She was the wife of another who dragged me down. You are the
wife of another who have lifted me up. She through sin was attainable.
That you can never, never be, else should I have done with life in
earnest. But do not blame yourself, sweet saint. You did as your pure
spirit bade you; soon all would have been well but that already Messer
Pier Luigi had seen you."

She shuddered.

"You know, dear that if I submitted to wed your cousin, it was to save
you--that such was the price imposed?"

"Dear saint!" I cried.

"I but mention it that upon such a score you may have no doubt of my
motives."

"How could I doubt?" I protested.

I rose, and moved down the room towards the window, behind which the
night gleamed deepest blue. I looked out upon the gardens from which
the black shadows of stark poplars thrust upward against the sky, and I
thought out this thing. Then I turned to her, having as I imagined found
the only and rather obvious solution.

"There is but one thing to do, Bianca."

"And that?" her eyes were very anxious, and looked perhaps even more so
in consequence of the pallor