"
Father Antonio felt a little conscience-smitten in listening to these
triumphant assertions of old Elsie; for he knew that she would pour all
her vials of wrath on his head, did she know, that, owing to his absence
from his little charge, the dreaded invader had managed to have two
interviews with her grandchild, on the very spot that Elsie deemed the
fortress of security; but he wisely kept his own counsel, believing in
the eternal value of silence. In truth, the gentle monk lived so much
in the unreal and celestial world of Beauty, that he was by no means
a skilful guide for the passes of common life. Love, other than that
ethereal kind which aspires towards Paradise, was a stranger to his
thoughts, and he constantly erred in attributing to other people natures
and purposes as unworldly and spiritual as his own. Thus had he fallen,
in his utter simplicity, into the attitude of a go-between protecting
the advances of a young lover with the shadow of his monk's gown, and
he became awkwardly conscious, that, if Elsie should find out the whole
truth, there would be no possibility of convincing her that what had
been done in such sacred simplicity on all sides was not the basest
manoeuvring.
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