“I am very far from being a holy man,” interrupted the priest.  “If I feel horror, it is for what has been, and may be, but not for you.  Bosio—­” he hesitated a moment.  “Will you come with me to Muro, and leave all this?” he asked suddenly.  “Will you come out of the world for a while?  No—­I am not proposing to you to make a religious retreat.  I wish I could.  I know the world, and you, and your people, for I lived long among you, and I know that one cannot change one’s soul, as one changes one’s coat—­nor enter upon a retreat as one springs into the sea for a bath in hot weather.  What you have made yourself, you are.  Heaven itself would need time to unmake you.  I speak just as one man to another.  Come with me to the mountains for a week, a month—­as long as you will.  It is dreary and cold, and you will have to eat what you can get; but you will have peace, for nobody will come up there to disturb you.  Meanwhile, something may happen.  You are overwrought by all you have seen and heard and felt.  Whatever the countess may have said, Donna Veronica is quite safe.  My dear Bosio, people in your rank of life do not murder one another for money nowadays.  It is laughable, the mere idea of it—­”

“Laughable!” Bosio turned and looked at him.  “If you had seen her eyes, you would find it hard to laugh, I think.  Such things happen rarely, perhaps, but they happen sometimes.”

Don Teodoro was not persuaded.  He thought that Bosio, in his excited state, very much overestimated the danger.

“At all events,” he said, “nothing will happen, so long as there is the possibility that you may marry her.  If you come with me, you will at least have time to think before acting.  But here, you may be forced to act before you have been able to think.”

But Bosio shook his head slowly.

“There are difficulties which can be helped by putting them off,” he answered.  “This is not one.  You forget that in just three weeks my brother will be ruined—­absolutely ruined—­if he cannot pay.  If I stayed that time with you, I should come back to find him a beggar—­or obliged to throw himself upon Veronica’s mercy and charity for his daily bread and for a roof to cover him.”

“There is one other way,” said the priest, thoughtfully.  “There is one thing left for you to do, if you have courage to do it.  And you know better than I what chance there would be of success.  It is what I should do myself.  It is a heroic remedy, but it may save everything yet.”

Bosio’s eyes turned anxiously to his friend, by way of question.

“Find Veronica alone,” said Don Teodoro.  “Take all rights into your own hands and tell her everything, just as you have told me.  You know her well.  If she is kind-hearted, as I think she is, she will pay your brother’s debts, take over the estates herself, since it is time, and manage that Cardinal Campodonico shall never suspect that there has been anything wrong with the administration.  If she is not so charitable as to do that of her own free will, why then, since you believe it, tell her that she must do it to save her life.  It is most unlikely that she will refuse and take refuge with the cardinal in order to bring public disgrace upon her father’s sister.  And even that, horrible as it seems to you—­if it must be, it will be, and it will not be your fault—­”