Leonard followed his direction, and soon found himself, for the first time, in that sombre, solemn retreat.
It was a hot summer day, and the grove was delicious. It was also a place well suited to the imaginative and religious mind of the Italian.
He walked slowly to and fro, in religious meditation. Indeed he had nearly thought out his next sermon, when his meditative eye happened to fall on a terrestrial object that startled and thrilled him. Yet it was only a lady's glove. It lay at the foot of a rude wooden seat beneath a gigantic pine.
He stooped and picked it up. He opened the little fingers, and called up in fancy the white and tapering hand that glove could lit. He laid the glove softly on his own palm, and eyed it with dreamy tenderness. "So this is the hand that hath solaced my loneliness," said he: "a hand fair as that angelical face, and sweet as the kind heart that doeth good by stealth."
Then, forgetting for a moment, as lofty spirits will, the difference between meum and tuum, he put the little glove in his bosom, and paced thoughtfully home through the woods, that were separated from the grove only by one meadow: and so he missed the owner of the glove; for she had returned home while he was meditating in her favourite haunt.
Leonard, amongst his other accomplishments, could draw and paint with no mean skill. In one of those hours that used to be of melancholy, but now were hours of dreamy complacency, he took out his pencils and endeavoured to sketch the inspired face that he had learned to preach to, and now to dwell on with gratitude.
Clearly as he saw it before him, he could not reproduce it to his own satisfaction.
After many failures he got very near the mark: yet still something was wanting.
Then, as a last resource, he actually took his sketch to church with him, and in preaching made certain pauses, and, with a very few touches, perfected the likeness; then, on his return home, threw himself on his knees and prayed forgiveness of God with many sighs and tears, and hid the sacrilegious drawing out of his own sight.
Two days after, he was at work colouring it; and the hours flew by like minutes, as he laid the mellow, melting tints on with infinite care and delicacy. Labor ipse voluptas.