-school when he was ten years old. He
seemed to have an absolute need of it; without it, life was impossible
to go on.

Father Cristoforo was not without visitings of the same sort of feeling;
but he allowed no trace of such soft-heartedness to appear as he put
Dino through a searching examination concerning the way in which he had
spent his time in England. Dino answered his questions fully and
clearly: he had nothing that he wished to hide. Even the Prior could not
accuse him of a wish to excuse himself. He told the story of his
interview with Hugo, of the dinner, of Hugo's attack upon him, and of
his sojourn in the hospital, where Brian had sought him out and
convinced him (without knowing that he was doing so) of his innocence
with respect to Hugo's plot. Then came the story of his intercourse with
Brian, his discovery that Brian's happiness hinged upon his love for
Elizabeth Murray, and his attempts to unravel the very tangled skein of
his friend's fortunes. Mr. Brett's opinion of the case, Brian's letter
to Mrs. Luttrell, Dino's own visit to Scotland, with its varied effects,
including the final destruction of the papers--all this was quietly and
fully detailed, with an occasional interruption only from Padre
Cristoforo in the shape of a question or a muttered comment. And when
the whole story was told the Prior spoke.

Everything that Dino had done was, of course, wrong. He ought never to
have seen Hugo, or dined with him: he ought to have gone to Father
Connolly, the priest to whose care he had been recommended, as soon as
he came out of hospital: he ought never to have interfered in Brian's
love affairs, nor gone to Scotland, nor sought to impose conditions on
Mrs. Luttrell, nor, in short, done any of the thousand and one things
that he had done. As for the destruction of the papers, it was a point
on which he (Father Cristoforo) hardly dared, he said, with a shrug of
his shoulders, to touch. The base ingratitude, the unfaithfulness to the
interests of the Church, the presumption, the pride, the wilfulness,
manifested in that action, transcended all his powers of reprobation.
The matter must be referred to a higher authority than his. And so
forth. And every word he said was like a dagger planted in Dino's
breast.

As for his desire to be a monk, the Prior repudiated the notion with
contempt. Dino Vasari a monk, after this lapse from obedience and
humility? He was not fit to do the humblest work of the lowes