If Padre Francesco had not failed to make those inquiries into the character of Agnes’s mysterious lover which he assumed to be necessary as a matter of pastoral faithfulness.

It was not difficult for one possessing the secrets of the confessional to learn the real character of any person in the neighborhood, and it was with a kind of bitter satisfaction which rather surprised himself that the father learned enough ill of the cavalier to justify his using every possible measure to prevent his forming any acquaintance with Agnes.  He was captain of a band of brigands, and, of course, in array against the State; he was excommunicated, and, of course, an enemy of the Church.  What but the vilest designs could be attributed to such a man?  Was he not a wolf prowling round the green, secluded pastures where as yet the Lord’s lamb had been folded in unconscious innocence?

Father Francesco, when he next met Agnes at the confessional, put such questions as drew from her the whole account of all that had passed between her and the stranger.  The recital on Agnes’s part was perfectly translucent and pure, for she had said no word and had had no thought that brought the slightest stain upon her soul.  Love and prayer had been the prevailing habit of her life, and in promising to love and pray she had had no worldly or earthly thought.  The language of gallantry, or even of sincere passion, had never reached her ear; but it had always been as natural to her to love every human being as for a plant with tendrils to throw them round the next plant, and therefore she entertained the gentle guest who had lately found room in her heart without a question or a scruple.

As Agnes related her childlike story of unconscious faith and love, her listener felt himself strangely and bitterly agitated.  It was a vision of ignorant purity and unconsciousness rising before him, airy and glowing as a child’s soap-bubble, which one touch might annihilate; but he felt a strange remorseful tenderness, a yearning admiration, at its unsubstantial purity.  There is something pleading and pitiful in the simplicity of perfect ignorance,—­a rare and delicate beauty in its freshness, like the morning-glory cup, which, once withered by the heat, no second morning can restore.  Agnes had imparted to her confessor, by a mysterious sympathy, something like the morning freshness of her own soul; she had redeemed the idea of womanhood from gross associations, and set before him a fair ideal of all that female tenderness and purity may teach to man.  Her prayers—­well he believed in them,—­but be set his teeth with a strange spasm of inward passion,—­when he thought of her prayers and love being given to another.  He tried to persuade himself that this was only the fervor of pastoral zeal against a vile robber who had seized the fairest lamb of the sheepfold; but there was an intensely bitter, miserable feeling connected with it, that scorched and burned his higher aspirations like a stream of lava running among fresh leaves and flowers.