“If I should take this only way of escape, and it seemed desperate to all others, would you still be my friend?” “I should be your friend if the whole world turned against you.” “Would you be my friend,” he asked eagerly in lower tones, and with signs of an inward struggle, “if this way of escape were for me to be no longer a priest?” “Oh yes, yes! Why not?” cried the girl; and her face glowed with heroic sympathy and defiance. It is from this heaven-born ignorance in women of the insuperable difficulties of doing right that men take fire and accomplish the sublime impossibilities. Our sense of details, our fatal habits of reasoning paralyze us; we need the impulse of the pure ideal which we can get only from them. These two were alike children as regarded the world, but he had a man’s dark prevision of the means, and she a heavenly scorn of everything but the end to be achieved. He drew a long breath. “Then it does not seem terrible to you?” “Terrible? No! I don’t see how you can rest till it is done!” “Is it true, then, that you urge me to this step, which indeed I have so long desired to take?” “Yes, it is true! Listen, Don Ippolito: it is the very thing that I hoped you would do, but I wanted you to speak of it first. You must have all the honor of it, and I am glad you thought of it before. You will never regret it!” She smiled radiantly upon him, and he kindled at her enthusiasm. In another moment his face darkened again. “But it will cost much,” he murmured. “No matter,” cried Florida. “Such a man as you ought to leave the priesthood at any risk or hazard. You should cease to be a priest, if it cost you kindred, friends, good fame, country, everything!” She blushed with irrelevant consciousness. “Why need you be downhearted? With your genius once free, you can make country and fame and friends everywhere. Leave Venice! There are other places. Think how inventors succeed in America”-- “In America!” exclaimed the priest. “Ah, how long I have desired to be there!” “You must go. You will soon be famous and honored there, and you shall not be a stranger, even at the first. Do you know that we are going home very soon? Yes, my mother and I have been talking of it to-day. We are both homesick, and you see that she is not well. You shall come to us there, and make our house your home till you have formed some plans of your own. Everything will be easy. God _is_ good,” she said in a breaking voice, “and you may be sure he will befriend you.” “Some one,” answered Don Ippolito, with tears in his eyes, “has already been very good to me. I thought it was you, but I will call it God!” “Hush! You mustn’t say such things. But you must go, now. Take time to think, but not too much time. Only,--be true to yourself.”