e to stay where that love was, be the
cost what it would, daunted him with a sense of power and of triumph
such as he himself could not even comprehend, and yet wistfully envied.
It was sin, no doubt, he said to himself; and yet it was life, it was
strength, it was virility.

He had come to reprove, to censure, and to persuade into repentance this
headstrong lover, and he could only stand before him feeble and
oppressed with a sense of his own ignorance and childishness. All the
stock, trite arguments which his religious belief supplied him seemed to
fall away and to be of no more use than empty husks of rotten nuts
before the urgency, the fervor, and the self-will of real life. This man
and woman loved each other, and they cared for no other fact than this
on earth or in heaven. He left the villa-grounds in silence, with only a
gesture of farewell salutation.

CHAPTER II.

"Poor innocent, he meant well!" thought the steward, as he watched the
dark, slender form of the priest pass away through the vines and
mulberry-trees. The young man did not greatly venerate the Church
himself, though he showed himself at mass and sent flowers for the
feast-days because it was the custom to do so. He was like most young
Italians who have had a smattering of education, very indifferent on
such matters, and inclined to ridicule. He left them for women and old
men. But there was something about his visitant which touched him,--a
simplicity, an unworldliness, a sincerity, which moved his respect; and
he knew in his secret heart that the parocco, as he called him, was
right enough in everything that he had said.

Gesualdo himself went on his solitary way, his buckled shoes dragging
wearily over the dusty grass of the wayside. He had done no good, and he
did not see what good he could do. He felt helpless before the force and
speed of an unknown and guilty passion, as he once felt before a forest
fire which he had seen in the Marche. All his Church books gave him
homilies enough on the sins of the flesh and the temptings of the devil;
but none of these helped him before the facts of this lawless and
godless love, which seemed to pass high above his head like a whirlwind.
He went on slowly and dully along the edge of the river-bed: a sense of
something which he had always missed, which he would miss eternally, was
with him.

It was now quite night. Gesualdo liked to walk late at night. All things
were so peaceful, or at the le