"I can hardly tell. Something had already moved her to learn from me the story of my life--to know that I was a man with neither faith nor hope. Her pure heart was torn by the thought of my wrong and of my error. I had never seen myself in such deformity as she saw me even when she used me with that divine compassion. I was almost glad to be what I was because of her angelic pity for me!"
The tears sprang to Don Ippolito's eyes, but Ferris asked in the same tone as before, "Was it then that she bade you be no longer a priest?"
"No, not then," patiently replied the other; "she was too greatly overwhelmed with my calamity to think of any cure for it. To-day it was that she uttered those words--words which I shall never forget, which will support and comfort me, whatever happens!"
The painter was biting hard upon the stem of his pipe. He turned away and began ordering the color-tubes and pencils on a table against the wall, putting them close together in very neat, straight rows. Presently he said: "Perhaps Miss Vervain also advised you to go to America?"
"Yes," answered the priest reverently. "She had thought of everything. She has promised me a refuge under her mother's roof there, until I can make my inventions known; and I shall follow them at once."
"They are going, she told me. Madama does not grow better. They are homesick. They--but you must know all this already?"
"Oh, not at all, not at all," said the painter with a very bitter smile. "You are telling me news. Pray go on."
"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.