see them.

"You are looking tired, carino," he said.

"I can't help it." There was a weary sound in Arthur's voice, and the
Padre noticed it at once.

"You should not have gone up to college so soon; you were tired out with
sick-nursing and being up at night. I ought to have insisted on your
taking a thorough rest before you left Leghorn."

"Oh, Padre, what's the use of that? I couldn't stop in that miserable
house after mother died. Julia would have driven me mad!"

Julia was his eldest step-brother's wife, and a thorn in his side.

"I should not have wished you to stay with your relatives," Montanelli
answered gently. "I am sure it would have been the worst possible thing
for you. But I wish you could have accepted the invitation of your
English doctor friend; if you had spent a month in his house you would
have been more fit to study."

"No, Padre, I shouldn't indeed! The Warrens are very good and kind, but
they don't understand; and then they are sorry for me,--I can see it
in all their faces,--and they would try to console me, and talk about
mother. Gemma wouldn't, of course; she always knew what not to say, even
when we were babies; but the others would. And it isn't only that----"

"What is it then, my son?"

Arthur pulled off some blossoms from a drooping foxglove stem and
crushed them nervously in his hand.

"I can't bear the town," he began after a moment's pause. "There are the
shops where she used to buy me toys when I was a little thing, and the
walk along the shore where I used to take her until she got too ill.
Wherever I go it's the same thing; every market-girl comes up to me
with bunches of flowers--as if I wanted them now! And there's the
church-yard--I had to get away; it made me sick to see the place----"

He broke off and sat tearing the foxglove bells to pieces. The silence
was so long and deep that he looked up, wondering why the Padre did
not speak. It was growing dark under the branches of the magnolia, and
everything seemed dim and indistinct; but there was light enough to show
the ghastly paleness of Montanelli's face. He was bending his head
down, his right hand tightly clenched upon the edge of the bench. Arthur
looked away with a sense of awe-struck wonder. It was as though he had
stepped unwittingly on to holy ground.

"My God!" he thought; "how small and selfish I am beside him! If my
trouble were his own he couldn't feel it more."

Presently Montanelli raised his head and