.

My tone caused the priest to look at me with sharp, kindly eyes.

"Have you such thoughts for yourself, perchance?" he asked me.

"Unless you should adjudge me too unworthy for the office," I answered
humbly.

"But you are very young, my son," he said, and laid a kindly hand upon
my shoulder. "Have you suffered, then, so sorely at the hands of the
world that you should wish to renounce it and to take up this lonely
life?"

"I was intended for the priesthood, father," I replied. "I aspired to
holy orders. But through the sins of the flesh I have rendered myself
unworthy. Here, perhaps, I can expiate and cleanse my heart of all the
foulness it gathered in the world."

He left me an hour or so later, to make his way back to Casi, having
heard enough of my past and having judged sufficiently of my attitude of
mind to approve me in my determination to do penance and seek peace in
that isolation. Before going he bade me seek him out at Casi at any
time should any doubts assail me, or should I find that the burden I had
taken up was too heavy for my shoulders.

I watched him go down the winding, mountain path, watched the bent old
figure in his long black gaberdine, until a turn in the path and a clump
of chestnuts hid him from my sight.

Then I first tasted the loneliness to which on that fair morning I had
vowed myself. The desolation of it touched me and awoke self-pity in my
heart, to extinguish utterly the faint flame of ecstasy that had warmed
me when first I thought of taking the dead anchorite's place.

I was not yet twenty, I was lord of great possessions, and of life I had
tasted no more than one poisonous, reckless draught; yet I was done
with the world--driven out of it by penitence. It was just; but it was
bitter. And then I felt again that touch of ecstasy to reflect that it
was the bitterness of the resolve that made it worthy, that through its
very harshness was it that this path should lead to grace.

Later on I busied myself with an inspection of the hut, and my first
attentions were for the miraculous image. I looked upon it with awe, and
I knelt to it in prayer for forgiveness for the unworthiness I brought
to the service of the shrine.

The image itself was very crude of workmanship and singularly ghastly.
It reminded me poignantly of the Crucifix that had hung upon the
whitewashed wall of my mother's private dining-room and had been so
repellent to my young eyes.

From two arrow wounds i