“Yes,” answered the priest reverently. “She had thought of everything. She has promised me a refuge under her mother’s roof there, until I can make my inventions known; and I shall follow them at once.”
“Follow them?”
“They are going, she told me. Madama does not grow better. They are homesick. They—but you must know all this already?”
“Oh, not at all, not at all,” said the painter with a very bitter smile. “You are telling me news. Pray go on.”
“There is no more. She made me promise to come to you and listen to your advice before I took any step. I must not trust to her alone, she said; but if I took this step, then through whatever happened she would be my friend. Ah, dear friend, may I speak to you of the hope that these words gave me? You have seen—have you not?—you must have seen that”—
The priest faltered, and Ferris stared at him helpless. When the next words came he could not find any strangeness in the fact which yet gave him so great a shock. He found that to his nether consciousness it had been long familiar—ever since that day when he had first jestingly proposed Don Ippolito as Miss Vervain’s teacher. Grotesque, tragic, impossible—it had still been the under-current of all his reveries; or so now it seemed to have been.
Don Ippolito anxiously drew nearer to him and laid an imploring touch upon his arm,—“I love her!”
“What!” gasped the painter. “You? You I A priest?”
“Priest! priest!” cried Don Ippolito, violently. “From this day I am no longer a priest! From this hour I am a man, and I can offer her the honorable love of a man, the truth of a most sacred marriage, and fidelity to death!”
Ferris made no answer. He began to look very coldly and haughtily at Don Ippolito, whose heat died away under his stare, and who at last met it with a glance of tremulous perplexity. His hand had dropped from Ferris’s arm, and he now moved some steps from him. “What is it, dear friend?” he besought him. “Is there something that offends you? I came to you for counsel, and you meet me with a repulse little short of enmity. I do not understand. Do I intend anything wrong without knowing it? Oh, I conjure you to speak plainly!”