“Oh, how? Perhaps he did not understand you. No, he did not understand you. What did you say to him, Don Ippolito? Tell me!” She leaned towards him, in anxious emotion, as she spoke. The priest rose, and stretched out his arms, as if he would gather something of courage from the infinite space. In his visage were the sublimity and the terror of a man who puts everything to the risk. “How will it really be with me, yonder?” he demanded. “As it is with other men, whom their past life, if it has been guiltless, does not follow to that new world of freedom and justice?” “Why should it not be so?” demanded Florida. “Did _he_ say it would not?” “Need it be known there that I have been a priest? Or if I tell it, will it make me appear a kind of monster, different from other men?” “No, no!” she answered fervently. “Your story would gain friends and honor for you everywhere in America. Did _he_”-- “A moment, a moment!” cried Don Ippolito, catching his breath. “Will it ever be possible for me to win something more than honor and friendship there?” She looked up at him askingly, confusedly. “If I am a man, and the time should ever come that a face, a look, a voice, shall be to me what they are to other men, will _she_ remember it against me that I have been a priest, when I tell her--say to her, madamigella--how dear she is to me, offer her my life’s devotion, ask her to be my wife?”... Florida rose from the seat, and stood confronting him, in a helpless silence, which he seemed not to notice. Suddenly he clasped his hands together, and desperately stretched them towards her. “Oh, my hope, my trust, my life, if it were you that I loved?”... “What!” shuddered the girl, recoiling, with almost a shriek. “_You_? _A priest_!” Don Ippolito gave a low cry, half sob:-- “His words, his words! It is true, I cannot escape, I am doomed, I must die as I have lived!” He dropped his face into his hands, and stood with his head bowed before her; neither spoke for a long time, or moved. Then Florida said absently, in the husky murmur to which her voice fell when she was strongly moved, “Yes, I see it all, how it has been,” and was silent again, staring, as if a procession of the events and scenes of the past months were passing before her; and presently she moaned to herself “Oh, oh, oh!” and wrung her hands. The foolish fountain kept capering and babbling on. All at once, now, as a flame flashes up and then expires, it leaped and dropped extinct at the foot of the statue. Its going out seemed somehow to leave them in darkness, and under cover of that gloom she drew nearer the priest, and by such approaches as one makes toward a fancied apparition, when his fear will not let him fly, but it seems better to suffer the worst from it at once than to live in terror of it ever after, she lifted her hands to his, and gently taking them away from his face, looked into his hopeless eyes.