r-increasing
anxiety. To fast, she knew, was needful above all for a priest in Lent,
but he did not touch what he might lawfully have eaten: the new-laid
eggs and the crisp lettuces of her providing failed to tempt him; and no
mortal man, she told him, could live on air and water as he did.

"There should be reason in all piety," she said to him, and he assented.

But he did not change his ways, which were rather those of a monk of the
Thebaid than of a vicar of a parish. He had the soul in him of a St.
Anthony, of a St. Francis, and he had been born too late; the world as
it is was too coarse and too incredulous for him, even in a little
rustic primitive village hidden away from the eyes of men under its
millet and its fig-trees.

The people of Marca noticed the change in him. Pale he had always been,
but now he was the color of his own ivory Christ; taciturn, too, he had
always been, yet he had ever had playful words for the children, kind
words for the aged; these were silent now. The listless and mechanical
manner with which he went through the offices of the Church contrasted
with the passionate and despairing cries which seemed to come from his
very soul when he preached, and which vaguely frightened a rural
congregation who were wholly unable to understand them.

"One would think the good parocco had some awful sin on his soul," said
a woman to Candida one evening.

"Nay, nay; he is as pure as a lamb," said Candida, twirling her distaff.
"But he was always helpless and childlike, and too much taken up with
heavenly things--may the saints forgive me for saying so! He should be
in a monastery along with St. Romolo and St. Francis."

But yet the housekeeper, though loyalty itself, was, in her own secret
thoughts, not a little troubled at the change she saw in her master. She
put it down to the score of his agitation at the peril of Generosa Fe;
but this in itself seemed to her unfitting in one of his sacred calling.
A mere light-o'-love and saucebox, as she had always herself called the
miller's wife, was wholly unworthy to occupy, even in pity, the thoughts
of so holy a man.

There could not be a doubt that she had given that knife-stroke among
the canes in the dusk of the dawn of St. Peter and St. Paul, thought
Candida, among whose virtues charity had small place; but what had the
parocco to do with it?

In her rough way, motherly and unmannerly, she ventured to take her
master to task for so much interes