Polia was silent for a time. "Yes! Yes!" she exclaimed exaltedly. "God has not instituted a holier or more inviolable sacrament. It is in this way that a love such as yours must have reconciled its hopes and its duties in a marriage of the heart that the rest of mankind does not know, and your heavenly spouse would speak to you as I speak to you if she had heard you."
"She has heard me, Polia," Francesco replied, letting his head at that moment fall into his hands with a torrent of tears.
"So," Polia went on, as if she had not understood the last words he had spoken, "you will assume in three days the habit of one of the religious orders to be found in Venice?"
"In Treviso," said Francesco. "I have not gone as far as to forbid myself the happiness of still seeing her sometimes."
"In Treviso, Francesco? There you only know me…"
"Only you!" said Francesco.
At that moment the hand of the young princess found itself joined to that of the young painter and the princess spoke. "We did not notice," she said smiling, "that the gondola was stopping and that it has already returned to the palazzo of the Pisani. Now we have nothing further to say to each other on earth. Our final farewell, however, is not without sweetness if we have understood each other correctly, and our first heavenly meeting will be even sweeter."
"Goodbye forever!" said Francesco.
"Goodbye for always!" said Polia. Then she re-attached her mask and got down from the gondola.
The following day Polia was in Treviso. Three days later they tolled at the monastery of the Dominicans that symbolic funeral knell which announces the profession of faith of a new postulant and his death to the world. Polia spent the day in her oratory.