Your image drove
out all the sin from my soul. The peace which half a year of penance, of
fasting and flagellation could not bring me, was brought me by my love for
you when it awoke. It was as a purifying fire that turned to ashes all the
evil of desires that my heart had held."
Her hand pressed mine. She was weeping softly.
"I was an outcast," I continued. "I was a mariner without compass, far
from the sight of land, striving to find my way by the light of sentiments
implanted in me from early youth. I sought salvation desperately-sought
it in a hermitage, as I would have sought it in a cloister but that I had
come to regard myself as unworthy of the cloistered life. I found it at
last, in you, in the blessed contemplation of you. It was you who taught
me the lesson that the world is God's world and that God is in the world as
much as in the cloister. Such was the burden of your message that night
when you appeared to me on Monte Orsaro."
"0, Agostino!" she cried, "and all this being so can you refrain from
blaming me for what has come to pass? If I had but had faith in you--the
faith in the sign which we both received--I should have known all this;
known that if you had sinned you had been tempted and that you had atoned."
"I think the atonement lies here and now, in this," I answered very
gravely.
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