Yes, I really believe that my father was imploring me, and I remained apparently unmoved while I should have interrupted him with a cry in which my whole being was outpoured. Yet I was not in fact unmoved. There was too much pathos in the tone of his voice not to thrill through my early awakened sensibility. But by a singular inconsistency, that in me which was moved by his voice was precisely the very desire, all the desires, that he was trying to eradicate from my heart. That voice was chanting the stones of the house that had been built to triumph over time, the shelter of the roof, the unity of the family, the strength of the race which maintains itself upon the soil, the peace of the dead whom God has in his keeping. And while this canticle was thus making melody I was distinctly hearing another, sung for me alone by the music of the vagabond wind, the immensity of unknown spaces, the words of the shepherd on his way to the mountain; the apple blossoms showered upon my face the first day of my love, and Nazzarena’s laugh, and the hopeless shadow of the chestnut tree under which she had passed. For one moment my father thought that he had conquered. His piercing eyes, always studying me, discerned my emotion. An impulse of sincerity moved me to turn away without speaking, and he understood that I was far from him. His voice ceased. Surprised by the sudden silence I looked at him in my turn, and I saw sadness sweeping over him like a shadow, that heart-breaking shadow that rises from the hollows of the valleys and slowly climbs the mountains as night draws on.