"It bled for her, not for yourself," Sebastian explained. "In profane love, the lover who thinks he is grieving for the beloved is only grieving over his own loss of her, over his own short bereavement, or over his own humiliation and discomfiture. With you, Antonio, it was not so. You did not wish to take; you wished to give." "Do not make me out a saint when I know I am a sinner," said Antonio, almost sharply. "If she had been old, and tart, and ugly, would my heart have bled for her all the same?" "Perhaps not," Sebastian retorted. "But, if she had been old and ugly, neither would there have been much virtue in giving her up. Do not complain of her beauty. You had heroic work to do, and her beauty helped you to do it better. In England there are Puritans who would say that these azulejos and these gilded carvings must hinder us from doing the Work of God." "I do not follow you," said Antonio. "Tell me," Sebastian asked abruptly, "how you stand with the payments you have bound yourself to make." Antonio drew from his breast an account over which he had pored and pored for a month without making the adverse balance a vintem less. Sebastian conned it attentively from beginning to end. Then he said: "Follow me to my old cell and bring me paper and ink." He rose with so much difficulty that Antonio had to support him; but once fairly on his feet he moved quickly over the pavement. At the door of the cell Antonio left him; but before he had finished cutting a new quill and replenishing the sand-sprinkler in his own room, Sebastian rejoined him. Sitting down painfully at the tiny table he swiftly wrote a very short letter. Without reading it over he folded it, sealed it with a small brass seal which he drew from his pocket, and addressed it to a Spanish nobleman in a small town of the Asturias. "Let this be despatched at once," he said. "There is no time to lose." "A post leaves Navares in three days," replied Antonio. "José shall take the letter there this morning." "It is well," said Sebastian. "And when this José returns, let me see him as soon as he is rested." The cell was brighter than the chapel, and Antonio perceived that his friend was become almost as insubstantial as a ghost. He called to mind a passage from a new English poet about a man who, having wasted to a shadow, was ready to be resumed into the Great Shadow, the shadow and blackness of death. But Sebastian seemed rather to be a pure white flame, waiting to be drawn into the Great Light. "You have not broken your fast," cried Antonio in shame and alarm. "You must eat. I have good wine. You must rest. You must sleep. When the heat is over we will talk again, and you shall see José." "It has been meat and drink and rest and sleep to see you again, Father Antonio, and to hear what you have told me," the other answered. "But you are right. I must sleep. I will obey your orders."