"And you think the rest is simple! Well, for your sake I will do what I can."
"Will you dine with me to-night?"
"Impossible. I cannot leave the village for so much as an hour for the present. I am shepherd of a mountain flock, remember, and my first duty is to them. At any moment I may have a summons to one who is dying. A black sheep he has been perhaps, but all the more should he be washed white at the last. And I must hold myself ready to give him the extreme unction when I am sent for, if it be now or not till next week."
Vanno had set his heart upon his plan, and could hardly bear to have it indefinitely postponed; but he had learned through old experience that his good friend was not one to be persuaded from duty.
"You'll let me know the moment you're free, in any case," he urged.
"That very moment. But, meanwhile, something may happen that will help you to judge the lady for yourself—something definite."
"I should have judged her already, if it weren't for her eyes," Vanno said, with a sigh. "They have a look as if she'd just seen heaven! I can hardly tell you how, but they are different from all other women's eyes. They send out a ray of light, like an arrow to your heart."
"Mon Dieu!" exclaimed the priest.
"Don't laugh, Father. It's true, or I wouldn't have felt about her as I did from the first moment we looked at each other. She's beautiful, but I assure you it wasn't her beauty that made me follow her. It was something more mysterious than that. I swear to you, it was as if her eyes said to me, 'Why, here you are at last, you whom I've known since the beginning of things. I am the one you've waited for all your life.'"
"All your life! Twenty-seven years, is it not?"