“I feel as though I had a garden in my heart,” Marion said to the canonico as they went up into the church again.
The two were walking slowly and last, and in speaking Marion bent and kissed the prelate’s hand.
The hand held his a moment closely, and the canonico replied: “Where the Tree of Life is, there is always a garden.”
This conversation they had listened to between the Master and Peter followed them down the church, whose splendors seemed rather like virtues made visible than like any work of the hands of man. If they should ever be so lost and ungrateful as to leave this fold, to whom, indeed, should they go? And unless the Lord washed them from their sins, surely they could have no part with him. They still saw the lessening vision of the high-priest’s dim and solemn house as they passed down the church and out through the first portal; then the second fell behind them, and an Italian summer day caught them to its glowing breast.
“It seems to me,” the Signora said, “as if we had just been ordained, and were being sent out as missionaries. Of course you go home to breakfast with us, Marion,” she added.
“I was thinking of Fra Egidio this morning,” said Bianca softly, as they drove home through the hot sunshine. “He used to say, instead of 'I believe in God,’ 'I know God.’”
“That blessed Fra Egidio!” struck in Isabel, who had lately been reading about him. “He used to go into ecstasies, papa, whenever he heard the names of God or of heaven. And when he went into the street, sometimes people would call out, 'Fra Egidio, paradiso! paradiso!’ and instantly he would be rapt into an ecstasy, and perhaps be lifted up into the air. Why doesn’t some one go into ecstasies now at the thought of heaven?”
“Nobody prevents you, my dear,” her father said. “If you will be so lost to the world and so given to God that the mere hearing his name will lift you from the earth, so much the better.”
“You are quite right, papa,” she answered gently. “I had better look to myself.”
He smiled and laid his hand tenderly on hers.