n. It seemed
to him that there were two men within him: the one turbulent, passionate,
demented; the other vainly endeavoring by authority, reason, and
conscience to bring the rebel to subjection. The discipline of conventual
life, the extraordinary austerities to which he had condemned himself, the
monotonous solitude of his existence, all tended to exalt the vivacity of
the nervous system, which, in the Italian constitution, is at all times
disproportionately developed; and when those weird harp-strings of the
nerves are once thoroughly unstrung, the fury and tempest of the discord
sometimes utterly bewilders the most practised self-government.

But he felt that _something_ must be done with himself, and done
immediately; for in a few days he must again meet Agnes at the
confessional. He must meet her, not with weak tremblings and passionate
fears, but calm as Fate, inexorable as the Judgment-Day. He must hear her
confession, not as man, but as God; he must pronounce his judgments with a
divine dispassionateness. He must dive into the recesses of her secret
heart, and, following with subtile analysis all the fine courses of those
fibres which were feeling their blind way towards an earthly love, must
tear them remorselessly away. Well could he warn her of the insidiousness
of earthly affections; better than any one else he could show her how a
name that was blended with her prayers and borne before the sacred shrine
in her most retired and solemn hours might at last come to fill all her
heart with a presence too dangerously dear. He must direct her gaze up
those mystical heights where an unearthly marriage awaited her, its sealed
and spiritual bride; he must hurry her footsteps onward to the irrevocable
issue.

All this was before him. But ere it could be done, he must subdue
himself,--he must become calm and pulseless, in deadly resolve; and what
prayer, what penance might avail for this? If all that he had already
tried had so miserably failed, what hope? He resolved to quit for a season
all human society, and enter upon one of those desolate periods of retreat
from earthly converse well known in the annals of saintship as most
prolific in spiritual victories.

Accordingly, on the day after the conversation with Father Johannes, he
startled the monks by announcing to them that he was going to leave them
for several days.

"My brothers," he said, "the weight of a fearful penance is laid upon me,
which I must work