away the foundations of virtue from your soul. If in the
cataclysm that followed she was crushed and smothered, it is no more
than she had incurred."

I still protested that this view was all too lenient to me, that it
sprang of his love for me, that it was not just. Thereupon he began to
make clear to me many things that may have been clear to you worldly
ones who have read my scrupulous and exact confessions, but which at the
time were still all wrapped in obscurity for me.

It was as if he held up a mirror--an intelligent and informing
mirror--in which my deeds were reflected by the light of his own deep
knowledge. He showed me the gradual seduction to which I had been
subjected; he showed me Giuliana as she really was, as she must be from
what I had told him; he reminded me that she was older by ten years than
I, and greatly skilled in men and worldliness; that where I had gone
blindly, never seeing what was the inevitable goal and end of the road
I trod, she had consciously been leading me thither, knowing full well
what the end must be, and desiring it.

As for the murder of Fifanti, the thing was grievous; but it had been
done in the heat of combat, and he could not think that I had meant the
poor man's death. And Fifanti himself was not entirely without blame.
Largely had he contributed to the tragedy. There had been evil in his
heart. A good man would have withdrawn his wife from surroundings which
he knew to be perilous and foul, not used her as a decoy to enable him
to trap and slay his enemy.

And the greatest blame of all he attached to that Messer Arcolano who
had recommended Fifanti to my mother as a tutor for me, knowing full
well--as he must have known--what manner of house the doctor kept
and what manner of wanton was Giuliana. Arcolano had sought to serve
Fifanti's interests in pretending to serve mine and my mother's; and my
mother should be enlightened that at last she might know that evil man
for what he really was.

"But all this," he concluded, "does not mean, Agostino, that you are
to regard yourself as other than a great sinner. You have sinned
monstrously, even when all these extenuations are considered."

"I know, I know!" I groaned.

"But beyond forgiveness no man has ever sinned, nor have you now. So
that your repentance is deep and real, and when by some penance that
I shall impose you shall have cleansed yourself of all this mire that
clings to your poor soul, you shall have absol