passion which the long habit of repression had not yet succeeded in
extinguishing. He cast his eyes to the ceiling in such a glance of despair
as left me thoughtful. It was as an invocation to Heaven to look down upon
the obstinate, ignorant folly of this woman who accounted herself wise and
who so garbled the Divine teaching as to blaspheme with complacency.

I know that now; at the time I was not quite so clear­sighted as to read
the full message of that glance.

Her audacity was as the audacity of fools. Where wisdom, full-fledged,
might have halted, trembling, she swept resolutely onward. Before her
stood this friar, this teacher and interpreter, this man of holy life who
was accounted profoundly learned in the Divinities; and he told her that
she had done an evil thing. Yet out of the tiny pittance of her knowledge
and her little intellectual sight--which was no better than a blindness--
must she confidently tell him that he was at fault.

Argument was impossible between him and her. Thus much I saw, and I feared
an explosion of the wrath of which I perceived in him the signs. But he
quelled it. Yet his voice rumbled thunderously upon his next words.

"It matters something that Gino Falcone should not starve," he said.

"It matters more that my son should not be damned," she answered him, and
with that answer left him weapon-less, for against the armour of a
crassness so dense and one-ideaed there are no weapons that can prevail.

"Listen," she said, and her eyes, raised for a moment, comprehended both of
us in their glance. "There is something that it were best I tell you, that
once for all you may fathom the depth of my purpose for Agostino here. My