of treating his female penitents, would be maliciously noted. The military
education of his early days had still left in his mind a strong residuum
of personal courage and honor, which made him regard it as dastardly to
flee when he ought to conquer, and therefore he set his face as a flint
for victory.

But reviewing his interior world, and taking a survey of the work before
him, he felt that sense of a divided personality which often becomes so
vivid in the history of individuals of strong will and passion. It seemed
to him that there were two men within him: the one turbulent, passionate,
demented; the other vainly endeavoring by authority, reason, and
conscience to bring the rebel to subjection. The discipline of conventual
life, the extraordinary austerities to which he had condemned himself, the
monotonous solitude of his existence, all tended to exalt the vivacity of
the nervous system, which, in the Italian constitution, is at all times
disproportionately developed; and when those weird harp-strings of the
nerves are once thoroughly unstrung, the fury and tempest of the discord
sometimes utterly bewilders the most practised self-government.

But he felt that _something_ must be done with himself, and done
immediately; for in a few days he must again meet Agnes at the
confessional. He must meet her, not with weak tremblings and passionate
fears, but calm as Fate, inexorable as the Judgment-Day. He must hear her
confession, not as man, but as God; he must pronounce his judgments with a
divine dispassionateness. He must dive into the recesses of her secret
heart, and, following with subtile analysis all the fine courses of those
fibres which were feeling their blind way towards an earthly love, must
tear them remorselessly away. Well could he warn her of the insidiousness
of earthly affections; better than any one else he could show her how a
name that was blended with her prayers and borne before the sacred shrine