he lived.
Father Antonio nodded dismally.

"Where to go?" I asked. "Where to turn? Whom can we trust? In whom can
we repose the slightest confidence? Where can we look for hope?"

Again the _padre_ pointed to the sea. The hopeless aspect of its moonlit
and darkling calm struck me so forcibly that I did not even ask how he
proposed to get us out there. I only made a gesture of discouragement.
Outside the Casa, my life was not worth ten minutes' purchase. And how
could I risk her there? How could I propose to her to follow me to an
almost certain death? What could be the issue of such an adventure?
How could we hope to devise such secret means of getting away as would
prevent the _Lugarenos_ pursuing us? I should perish, then, and she...

Father Antonio seemed to lose his self-control suddenly.

"Yes," he cried. "The sea is a perfidious element, but what is it to
the blind malevolence of men?" He gripped my shoulder. "The risk to her
life," he cried; "the risk of drowning, of hunger, of thirst--that is
all the sea can do. I do not think of that. I love her too much. She
is my very own spiritual child; and I tell you, Senor, that the unholy
intrigue of that man endangers not her happiness, not her fortune
alone--it endangers her innocent soul itself."

A profound silence ensued. I remembered that his business was to save
souls. This old man loved that young girl whom he had watched growing
up, defenceless in her own home; he loved her with a great strength of
paternal instinct that no vow of celibacy can extinguish, and with a
heroic sense of his priestly duty. And I was not to say him nay. The
sea--so be it. It was easier to think of her dead than to think of her
immured; it was better that she should be the victim of the sea than of
evil men; that she should be lost with me than to me.

Father Antonio, with that naive sense of the poetry of the sky he
possessed, apostrophized the moon, the "gentle orb," as he called it,
which ought to be weary of looking at the miseries of the earth. His
immense shadow on the leads seemed to fling two vast fists over the
parapet, as if to strike at the enemies below, and without discussing
any specific plan we descended. It was understood that Seraphina and I
should try to escape--I won't say by sea, but to the sea. At best, to
ask the charitable help of some passing ship, at worst to go out of the
world together.

I had her confidence. I will not tell of my interview with her; bu