There was an interval of silence, then the penitent of his own accord resumed the conversation. "Did I hear you say you are under sentence of death?" he asked.
"I am so actually, though not formally," Carlos replied. "In the language of the Holy Office, I am a professed impenitent heretic."
"And you so young!"
"To be a heretic?"
"No; I meant so young to die.'
"Do I look young--even yet? I should not have thought it. To me the last two years seem like a long life-time."
"Have you been two years, then, in prison? Poor boy! Yet I have been here ten, fifteen, twenty years--I cannot tell how many. I have lost the account of them."
Carlos sighed. And such a life was before him, should he be weak enough to surrender his hope. He said, "Do you really think, señor, that these long years of lonely suffering are less hard to bear than a speedy though violent death?"
"I do not think it matters, as to that," was the penitent's not very apposite reply. In fact, his mind was not capable, at the time, of dealing with such a question; so he turned from it instinctively. But in the meantime he was remembering, every moment more and more clearly, that a duty had been laid upon him by the authority to which his soul held itself in absolute subjection. And that duty had reference to his fellow-prisoner.
"I am commanded," he said at last, "to counsel you to seek the salvation of your soul, by returning to the bosom of the one true Catholic and Apostolic Church, out of which there is no peace and no salvation."