This was practically Bosio Macomer’s only intimate friend.  For although the intimacy had been interrupted for years, by circumstances, it had never been checked by any action or word of either.  It is true that neither was, as a rule, in need of friendship, nor desirous of cultivating it.  Learning and charity absorbed the priest’s whole life.  Bosio’s existence, of which Don Teodoro knew in reality nothing, had moved in the vicious circle of a single passion, which he could never acknowledge, and which excluded, for common caution’s sake, anything like intimacy with other men.  But Bosio had not ceased to look upon the priest as the best man he had ever known, and in spite of his own errings, he was still quite able to appreciate goodness in others; and Don Teodoro had always remembered his pupil as one of the few men to whom he had been accustomed to speak freely of his hopes, and sympathies, and aspirations, feeling sure of appreciation from a nature at once refined and reticent, though itself hard to understand.  For Don Teodoro was, strange to say, painfully sensitive to ridicule, though in all other respects a singularly brave man, morally and physically.  As a child or as a boy, he had been laughed at by his companions for his extraordinary nose and his short sight; and he had never recovered from the childish suffering thus inflicted upon him by thoughtless children.  The fear of being ridiculous had largely influenced him through life, and had really contributed much towards deciding him to accept the cure of the wild mountain town.

Bosio’s almost solemn words, as his chin fell upon his breast, and he clasped his hands before him, suddenly recalled to the priest the years they had spent together, the confidence there had been between them, the interest he had once felt in Bosio’s fortune,—­as an object once daily familiar, and fresh once and not without beauty, then long hidden for years, and coming suddenly to sight again, moth-eaten, dusty, and all but destroyed, is oddly painful to him who used it long ago, and then sees it when it is fit only to be thrown away.

“You are suffering,” said Don Teodoro, leaning forward upon the marble table and peering through his silver-rimmed spectacles into Bosio’s pale face, and gentle, exhausted eyes.

The priest’s nervous, emaciated hand softly pressed the sleeve of the younger man’s coat, and the fantastic features grew wonderfully gentle and kind.  It was the transformation that came over them whenever any one was visibly poor, or starving, or sorrowing, or hurt,—­the change which a beautiful passion brings to the ugliest face in the world.

Bosio smiled faintly as he saw it, and a little hope was breathed into his heart, as though somewhere, at some immeasurable distance, there might be a possibility of salvation from the ruin and wreck of his horrible life.

“Yes,” he said.  “I am suffering.  It is a great suffering.  I do not think that I can live much longer.”