It was no use. Everything fell from him in that hour except that faith and that love which had been the controlling powers of his life. He had loved Brian as a brother; and he had done well: he had loved Elizabeth--though he had not known that the dreaming fancies which had lately centred round her deserved the name which the Prior had given to them--and he had not done ill; and it was right that he should give to them, what might, perhaps, avail to make their lives a little happier--at any rate all that he had to give. The Prior had said that he was wrong. And would the good God, whom he had always loved and worshipped from the days of his earliest boyhood, would the Good God condemn him, too! He did not think so. He was not sorry for what he had done at all. No, he did not repent. But how would it fare with him next day if he told the Prior this, the inmost conviction of his heart? He would be told again that he was not fit to be a monk. And the desire to be a monk--curious as it may seem to us--had grown up with Dino as a beautiful ideal. Was he now to be thrust out into the world--the world where men stole and lied and stabbed each other in the dark, all for the sake of a few acres of land or a handful of gold pieces--and denied the hard, ascetic, yet tranquil and finely-ordered life which he had hoped to lead, when he put on his monkish robe, for the remainder of his days? Dino was an enthusiast: he might, perhaps, have been disenchanted if he had lived as one of themselves amongst the brethren who seemed to him so enviable; but just now his whole being rose in revolt against a decision which deprived him of all that he had been taught to consider blessed. Then a strange revulsion of feeling came. There were good men in the world, he remembered, as well as bad: there were beautiful women; there was art, and music, and much that makes life seem worth living. Why, after all, if the monks rejected him, should he not go to the world and take his pleasure there like other men? And there came a vision of Elizabeth, with her pale face turned to him in pity, and her hand beckoning him to follow her. Then, after a little interval, he came to himself, and knew that his mind had wandered; and so, in order to steady his thoughts, he began to speak aloud, and a novice, who had been sent to say a certain number of prayers at that hour in church by way of penance, started from a fitful slumber on his knees, and heard the words that Dino said. They sounded strange to the young novice: he repeated them next day with a sense that he might be uttering blasphemy, and was very much astonished when the Prior drew his hand across his eyes as if to wipe away a tear, and did not seem horrified in the very least. And this was what Dino said:--