"I have told you all that I did," stammered Dino.
"But not all that you thought."
There was a short silence. Then Dino spoke again, in short-broken sentences, which at times the Prior could scarcely hear.
"Reverend Father, there is one thought, one feeling. I do not know what it is. I am haunted by a face which never leaves me. And yet I saw it twice only: once in a picture and once in life; but it comes between me and my prayers. I cannot forget her."
"Whose face was this?" asked the Prior, with the subtle change of eye and lip which showed that Dino's answer had fulfilled his expectations. "Her name?"
But the name that Dino murmured was not one that Padre Cristoforo had expected to hear from him.
"Elizabeth Murray!" he repeated. "The woman that Brian Luttrell loves—for whose sake you gave up your inheritance—that you might not turn her out. The mystery is solved. I see the motive now. You love this woman."
"And if I have loved her, if I do love her," said Dino, passionately, his whole face lighting up with impetuous feeling, and his hands trembling as they clasped each other, "it is no sin to love."
The Prior gave him a long, steady gaze. "You have sacrificed your faith to your love," he said, "and that is a sin. You have forgotten your obedience to the Church for a woman's sake—and that is a sin. Lastly, you come here professing a monk's vocation, yet acknowledging—with reluctance—that this woman's face comes between you and your prayers. I do not say that this is a sin, but I say that you had better leave us to-morrow, for you have proved yourself unfit for the life that we lead at San Stefano. Go back to Scotland and marry. Or, if you cannot do that, we will give you money, and start you in some professional career; your aims are too low, your will is too weak, for us."
Again the Prior was not quite in earnest. He wanted to try the strength of his pupil's resolve. But when Dino said, "I will not leave you, I will tend the vines and the goats at your door, but I will never go away," the priest felt a revival of all the old tenderness which he had been used to lavish silently on the brown-eyed boy who had come to him from old Assunta.