But he felt that something must be done with himself, and done immediately; for in a few days he must again meet Agnes at the confessional.  He must meet her, not with weak tremblings and passionate fears, but calm as Fate, inexorable as the Judgment-Day.  He must hear her confession, not as man, but as God; he must pronounce his judgments with a divine dispassionateness.  He must dive into the recesses of her secret heart, and, following with subtile analysis all the fine courses of those fibres which were feeling their blind way towards an earthly love, must tear them remorselessly away.  Well could he warn her of the insidiousness of earthly affections; better than any one else he could show her how a name that was blended with her prayers and borne before the sacred shrine in her most retired and solemn hours might at last come to fill all her heart with a presence too dangerously dear.  He must direct her gaze up those mystical heights where an unearthly marriage awaited her, its sealed and spiritual bride; he must hurry her footsteps onward to the irrevocable issue.

All this was before him.  But ere it could be done, he must subdue himself,—­he must become calm and pulseless, in deadly resolve; and what prayer, what penance might avail for this?  If all that he had already tried had so miserably failed, what hope?  He resolved to quit for a season all human society, and enter upon one of those desolate periods of retreat from earthly converse well known in the annals of saintship as most prolific in spiritual victories.

Accordingly, on the day after the conversation with Father Johannes, he startled the monks by announcing to them that he was going to leave them for several days.

“My brothers,” he said, “the weight of a fearful penance is laid upon me, which I must work out alone.  I leave you today, and charge you not to seek to follow my footsteps; but, as you hope to escape hell, watch and wrestle for me and yourselves during the time I am gone.  Before many days I hope to return to you with renewed spiritual strength.”

That evening, while Agnes and her uncle were sitting together in their orange-garden, mingling their parting prayers and hymns, scenes of a very different description surrounded the Father Francesco.

One who looks on the flowery fields and blue seas of this enchanting region thinks that the Isles of the Blest could scarcely find on earth a more fitting image; nor can he realize, till experience proves it to him, that he is in the immediate vicinity of a weird and dreary region which might represent no less the goblin horrors of the damned.