It was rather the nature of Paolina's own motives for her
expedition, as they were patent to the old monk, that disquieted him
on her behalf. He had marked the expression of her face when she had
seen the bagarino with Ludovico and his companion pass along the
road towards the forest, and the change in her whole manner after
that. And monk, and octogenarian as he was, he had been at no loss
to comprehend the nature of the emotions which had been aroused in
her mind by the sight. And he feared that evil might arise from the
collision of passions, which it seemed likely were about to be
brought into the presence of each other.

Perhaps, monk and aged as he was, the apprehensions with which his
mind was busy seemed more big with possible evil than they might to
another. Perhaps it was so long since he had had aught to do with
stormy passions that the contemplation of them affrighted his
stagnant mind all the more by reason of the long years of
passionless placidity to which it was accustomed. Perhaps he had
known passions stormy enough in the long long past, and had
experience of the harvest of evils which might be expected to be
produced by them.

Report said, that when Father Fabiano had been sent by his superiors
to occupy the miserable and forlorn sentinel's post at the church-
door of St. Apollinare, amid inundations in winter, and fever and
ague in summer, his appointment to the dreary office had been of the
nature of a penance and an exile. It was said, too, that the
sentence of exile, which placed him in his present position, had
been an alleviation of a more rigorous punishment; that he had been
allowed, after a period of many years of imprisonment in a monastery
of his order at Venice, to change that punishment for the duty to