“There is no more. She made me promise to come to you and listen to your advice before I took any step. I must not trust to her alone, she said; but if I took this step, then through whatever happened she would be my friend. Ah, dear friend, may I speak to you of the hope that these words gave me? You have seen--have you not?--you must have seen that”-- The priest faltered, and Ferris stared at him helpless. When the next words came he could not find any strangeness in the fact which yet gave him so great a shock. He found that to his nether consciousness it had been long familiar--ever since that day when he had first jestingly proposed Don Ippolito as Miss Vervain’s teacher. Grotesque, tragic, impossible--it had still been the under-current of all his reveries; or so now it seemed to have been. Don Ippolito anxiously drew nearer to him and laid an imploring touch upon his arm,--“I love her!” “What!” gasped the painter. “You? You I A priest?” “Priest! priest!” cried Don Ippolito, violently. “From this day I am no longer a priest! From this hour I am a man, and I can offer her the honorable love of a man, the truth of a most sacred marriage, and fidelity to death!” Ferris made no answer. He began to look very coldly and haughtily at Don Ippolito, whose heat died away under his stare, and who at last met it with a glance of tremulous perplexity. His hand had dropped from Ferris’s arm, and he now moved some steps from him. “What is it, dear friend?” he besought him. “Is there something that offends you? I came to you for counsel, and you meet me with a repulse little short of enmity. I do not understand. Do I intend anything wrong without knowing it? Oh, I conjure you to speak plainly!” “Wait! Wait a minute,” said Ferris, waving his hand like a man tormented by a passing pain. “I am trying to think. What you say is.... I cannot imagine it!” “Not imagine it? Not imagine it? And why? Is she not beautiful?” “Yes.” “And good?” “Without doubt.” “And young, and yet wise beyond her years? And true, and yet angelically kind?” “It is all as you say, God knows. But.... a priest”-- “Oh! Always that accursed word! And at heart, what is a priest, then, but a man?--a wretched, masked, imprisoned, banished man! Has he not blood and nerves like you? Has he not eyes to see what is fair, and ears to hear what is sweet? Can he live near so divine a flower and not know her grace, not inhale the fragrance of her soul, not adore her beauty? Oh, great God! And if at last he would tear off his stifling mask, escape from his prison, return from his exile, would you gainsay him?”