He was shivering, and his face was white as he rose to go and slip the bolt.  Re-entering the room, he locked the inner door also behind him.  Don Matteo had produced from a drawer an old violet stole with tarnished silver embroidery.  It was carefully wrapped up in thin, clean, white paper.  A priest always wears the stole in administering any of the seven sacraments.  He passed it over his head, and the broad bands fell over his breast, and he held the ends, upon which were embroidered small Greek crosses, in one of his hands.  Grave and silent, he sat down beside the table, resting his elbow upon it and shading his eyes with his other hand.

Don Teodoro knelt down, beside him at the table, and each said his part of the preliminary form in a low voice.  When Don Teodoro had said the first half of the ‘Confiteor,’ he was silent for some time, and Don Matteo was aware that his tall, thin frame was trembling, for the table shook under his elbow.  Then he began to speak, as follows:—­

“I must tell the story of my life.  My father was an officer in the army of King Ferdinand, under the former government, and I was his only child.  He had a little fortune, and his pay was relatively large for those days, so that I was brought up as a gentleman’s son.  My father, who had been so fortunate as to make many advantageous friendships in the course of his career, wished me to enter the military academy and the army.  By his interest I should have had rapid advancement.  But this was not my inclination.  Ever since I can remember anything, I know that I ardently wished to be a priest.  As a little boy, I used to make a small altar in a dark room behind my own, and I used to adorn it and dress it for the feast days, and light tapers on it, and save my pocket money to buy tiny silver ornaments for it.  Before I could read I knew the Rosary and the short Litanies, and I used to say them very devoutly before my little altar, with genuflexions and other gestures such as I saw the priests make in church.  My father smiled sometimes, but he did not interfere.  He was a devout man, though he was a soldier.  I had some facility for learning, also, and was fond of all books.  My mother died when I was four years old.

“I need not tell how the devout passion increased in me as I grew older.  I passed through all the stages of such development very quickly.  My father believed that I had a true vocation for the Church, and yielding to my entreaties and to the advice of his friends, who told him that he could never make a soldier of such a boy, he allowed me to enter a seminary.  I was very happy, and my love of books and my earnest desire to be a priest continued to increase.  I was made a deacon and received the tonsure.  Then I fell ill.  It was the will of Heaven, for I never was ill before that, nor have been since.  It was a long illness, a dangerous fever.  Just before that time, while I was in the seminary, my father had married a second time, a young and very beautiful woman, scarcely two years older than I. They both took care of me, and she was very kind and liked me from the first.