until he had taken
his tender heart and his ignorant mind to the seminary, and he had been
born with the soul of a St. Francis, of a San Rocco, of a St. John, out
of place, out of time, in the world he lived in, and in which the
passions of faith and of sacrifice were as strong as are the passions of
lust and of selfishness in other natures. The spiritual world was to him
a reality, and the earth, with its merciless and greedy peoples, its
plague of lusts, its suffering hearts, its endless injustice, an unreal
and hideous dream.

To his temper, the sacrifice which suddenly rose before him as his duty
appeared one which would reconcile him at once to the Deity he had
offended and the humanity he was tempted to betray. To his mind,
enfeebled and exhausted by long fasting of the body and denial of every
natural indulgence, such sacrifice of self seemed an imperious command
from heaven. He would drag out his own life in misery and obloquy,
indeed; but what of that? Had not the great martyrs and founders of his
Church endured as much or more? Was it not by such torture voluntarily
accepted and endured on earth that the grace of God was won?

He would tell a lie, indeed; he would draw down ignominy on the name of
the Church; he would make men believe that an anointed priest was a
common murderer, swayed by low and jealous hatreds; but of this he did
not think. In the tension and perplexity of his tortured soul, the
vision of a sacrifice in which he would be the only sufferer, in which
the woman would be saved and the secret told to him be preserved,
appeared as a heaven-sent solution of the doubts and difficulties in his
path. Stretched in agonized prayer before one of the side altars of the
church, he imagined the afternoon sunbeams streaming through the high
window on his face to be the light of a celestial world, and in the hush
and heat of the incense-scented air he believed that he heard a voice
which cried to him, "By suffering all things are made pure."

He was not a wise, or strong, or educated man. He had the heart of a
poet and the mind of a child. There was a courage in him to which
sacrifice was welcome, and there was a credulity in him which made all
exaggeration of simple faith possible. He was young and ignorant and
weak; yet at the core of his heart there was a dim heroism: he could
suffer and be mute: and in the depths of his heart he loved this woman
better than himself,--with a love which in his belief m