“It was not without sufficient warning that I took one order after another, but my uncle’s words, ‘What will you do?’ made me deaf to these admonitions. All that is now past. I no longer resent nor hate; I seem to have lost the power; but those were days when my soul was filled with bitterness. Something of this must have showed itself to those who had me in their charge. I have heard that at one time my superiors had grave doubts whether I ought to be allowed to take orders. My examination, in which the difficulties of the sacerdotal life were brought before me with the greatest clearness, was severe; I do not know how I passed it; it must have been in grace to my uncle. I spent the next ten days in a convent, to meditate upon the step I was about to take. Poor helpless, friendless wretch! Madamigella, even yet I cannot see how I was to blame, that I came forth and received the first of the holy orders, and in their time the second and the third. “I was a priest, but no more a priest at heart than those Venetian conscripts, whom you saw carried away last week, are Austrian soldiers. I was bound as they are bound, by an inexorable and inevitable law. “You have asked me why I became a priest. Perhaps I have not told you why, but I have told you how--I have given you the slight outward events, not the processes of my mind--and that is all that I can do. If the guilt was mine, I have suffered for it. If it was not mine, still I have suffered for it. Some ban seems to have rested upon whatever I have attempted. My work,--oh, I know it well enough!--has all been cursed with futility; my labors are miserable failures or contemptible successes. I have had my unselfish dreams of blessing mankind by some great discovery or invention; but my life has been barren, barren, barren; and save for the kindness that I have known in this house, and that would not let me despair, it would now be without hope.” He ceased, and the girl, who had listened with her proud looks transfigured to an aspect of grieving pity, fetched a long sigh. “Oh, I am sorry for you!” she said, “more sorry than I know how to tell. But you must not lose courage, you must not give up!” Don Ippolito resumed with a melancholy smile. “There are doubtless temptations enough to be false under the best of conditions in this world. But something--I do not know what or whom; perhaps no more my uncle or my mother than I, for they were only as the past had made them--caused me to begin by living a lie, do you not see?” “Yes, yes,” reluctantly assented the girl.