"As for him, his suffering was beyond words. Resistance inflamed his passion, and, for the first time in his life, he who had seduced and abandoned so many women learned what love is. But he also learned what remorse is, and from that day his mind was diseased. I hoped that he would be truly converted. I had no thought of making a monk of him like myself, but I wanted him to take up his old work, to renounce useless crimes, debauchery and folly. I tried to convince him that, if he should become once more the avenger of his country and the soul of our hope of deliverance, his young wife would forgive him and consent to share his painful but glorious destiny. Doubtless I myself would have thrown my frock to the dogs and followed him. "But, alas! it would be too easy for men to mend their ways if crime and vice would relax their grasp upon their victims as readily as we desire. The _Destatore_ was no longer himself; he had become too thoroughly the man of the past. The remorse that I aroused in him disturbed his reason without appeasing his savage instincts. Sometimes a raving madman, sometimes timid and superstitious, he would pray one day in our humble chapel, bathed in tears; and the next day would return to his vomit--as the Scripture says. He tried to kill all his companions; he tried to kill me. He committed many more excesses, and one morning--it is hard for me to carry my story through to the end, Michel, it gives me so much pain!--one morning he was found dead at the foot of a cross, not far from our convent. He had blown out his brains with a pistol!" "That was a horrible fate," said Michel, "and I do not know whether it is the tone of your voice, uncle, or the ghastly memories of the place where we are, but my emotions at this moment are most painful. It may be that I heard my father tell the story in my childhood, and that the memory of the terror it caused me then is revived by your words." "I do not believe that your father ever mentioned it to you," said the Capuchin, after an interval of dismal silence. "I only speak of it because I must, my child; for the remembrance is more painful to me than to anybody on earth, and the place where we now are is by no means calculated to arouse cheerful thoughts in my mind. See, yonder is the cross whose base was drenched with his blood, and there I found him lying, sadly disfigured. It was I who dug his grave with my own hands under yonder rock in the bottom of the ravine. It was I who said the prayers which anybody else would have refused to say for him.