“No, no!” she protested. “Can’t you see that does not matter to me now? It is only what you were then that counts to me! Your voice, your eyes, what you said—you made me care! Was it all a lie?”
He felt his heart contract at this visible suffering whose root was so unselfish a desire. His resolve crumbled.
“Teresa,” he said in a tone as strained as her own, “whatever of evil I have done, has not been since I have known you. You have waked something in me that would not sleep again. It was this you saw and heard and felt. I could not hide it. It has stayed with me ever since! It will always be with me now, whether I will or no. I did come here by accident. But I have stayed because the past—Venice and my life there—is hateful to me! It has been so since that morning at La Mira!”
“Oh!” she breathed, “then when you asked me for the prayer—you did not—you meant—”
“It was because it was almost the only unselfish and unworldly thing I had ever known. Because it was a thought for the scorned and unshriven; because of the very hurt it gave; because it was a prayer of yours—for me!”
While he spoke, a great gladness illumined her face. “Have you kept it?”
He turned from her instinctively to the shrine, his hand outstretched to raise the flat stone. But as suddenly he paused. He had placed it there in a half-sardonic mockery; not with the pure faith she would infer from the action. He could not stand in a false light before her.
He let the stone fall back into its place.
As he turned again to answer, he confronted two figures coming through the gateway a few paces off. One was an old man, his bent form dressed gaily. The other was Padre Somalian. The latter, in advance, had alone seen the lifted stone.
Both, however, saw the emotion in the two faces before them. The padre stood still; the other sprang forward, his posture instinct with an unhealthy passion, his piercing eyes on the pair with evil inquiry.