He could not go to bed at once.  He was too agitated.  Body of Bacchus! he kept repeating to himself.  Body of Bacchus!  One could hardly have imagined so extraordinary a case, and for it to happen to him, of all men!  His head felt as confused as when he played at tresette and did not understand the game and every one badgered him.  What a chaos there was in that head of good and of bad, of bitterness and of consolation!  The more extraordinary did the thing appear to him, with the greater faith, with the more timorous reverence, did he refer it all to the hand of God.  In thinking over his entrance into the kitchen, and that man seated at the hearth, memory gave him a stronger spasm of fear than the reality had, and it was immediately succeeded by mystic admiration of the hidden ways of the Lord.  Certainly Lucia’s fault was a bitter one, but how clearly the design of Providence could be seen in it!  It led a man to the house of the priest; through sin to grace.  What a great gift he had received from God, he the last of the priests of the parish, one of the last of the diocese!  A soul so lost, so hardened in evil!  He felt scruples at having allowed himself to be moved too strongly by the deception of his servant, the loss of the snuff-box.  Kneeling by his bed, he recited, amid rapid winks, an interminable series of Paters, Aves, and Glorias, and prayed the Lord, St. Luke, and St. Rocco to help him in properly directing this still immature confession.  Heavens! to come to confession with a string of oaths and to accuse others more than himself!  To Don Rocco the heart of the Moro appeared under an image which pleased him, it seemed so new and clear.  A healthy fruit with a first spot of decay; only in his case the image was reversed.

When he had gone to bed and was lying on his side, ready to sleep, it occurred to him that the next day Lucia would arrive.  This thought immediately suggested another, and made him turn right over flat on his back.

It brought up, in fact, a grave problem.  Had the Moro spoken of Lucia in confession or not?  Don Rocco remembered that he had made no remark when the man, having blown out the light, declared that he wished to confess.  Neither had he done so later when the man said:  “Don’t get excited, for we are in confession.”  Therefore, there was at least a grave doubt that this had been a real confession; and even if the penitent had afterwards interrupted it, this did not in the least detract from its sacramental character, had it existed; and, consequently, what about Lucia?  And his answer to the Countess Carlotta?  Body of Bacchus!  It seemed the case of Sigismondo.  Don Rocco cast a formidable frown at the ceiling.

He remembered the pereat mundus, and the arguments of that well of science, that extraordinary man, the professor.  It would be impossible now to send away Lucia.  And finally the dark words of Countess Carlotta were quite clear to him.  He himself must leave:  pereat Rochus.