He resumed his meditation. At last he turned and said:
"This was not a temptation from the devil. Neither did it spring from corruptness in your heart or in hers. I am persuaded that our Lord's work is somehow in it all. Perhaps you will never know in this world what work it is; but that is not your affair."
"Sometimes," said Antonio slowly, "it troubles my conscience. As I told you just now, I didn't hold out to the very end. I gave way within my heart; but when I opened my eyes she had vanished."
"You do wrong to be troubled," said Sebastian. "You held out to the bitter end of the trial God had appointed you. When you told this Isabel finally to go, she went. That was the end. All that happened afterwards was mere reaction."
"The next day," persisted Antonio, "I did not say my Office. My heart bled for her as it never bled for the Abbot, or for you, Sebastian, or for this place."
"It bled for her, not for yourself," Sebastian explained. "In profane love, the lover who thinks he is grieving for the beloved is only grieving over his own loss of her, over his own short bereavement, or over his own humiliation and discomfiture. With you, Antonio, it was not so. You did not wish to take; you wished to give."
"Do not make me out a saint when I know I am a sinner," said Antonio, almost sharply. "If she had been old, and tart, and ugly, would my heart have bled for her all the same?"
"Perhaps not," Sebastian retorted. "But, if she had been old and ugly, neither would there have been much virtue in giving her up. Do not complain of her beauty. You had heroic work to do, and her beauty helped you to do it better. In England there are Puritans who would say that these azulejos and these gilded carvings must hinder us from doing the Work of God."
"I do not follow you," said Antonio.
"Tell me," Sebastian asked abruptly, "how you stand with the payments you have bound yourself to make."