Orsino made his preparations for returning to Sicily with a heavy heart. His situation was desperate at present, for he had exhausted his ingenuity in trying to discover some means of seeing Vittoria a last time. To leave San Giacinto to do what he could with Camaldoli and refuse to go back at all, for the present, which seemed to be his only chance of a meeting with Vittoria, was a course against which his manliness revolted. Even if there had been no danger connected with the administration of the new estate, he would not have abandoned his cousin at such a time, after promising to help him, and indeed to undertake all work connected with the place. San Giacinto was a busy man, to whom any sacrifice of time might suddenly mean a corresponding loss of money, for which Orsino would hold himself responsible if he brought about the delay. But as it was, since the position he had promised to fill was a dangerous one, nothing could have induced him to withdraw from the undertaking. It would have seemed like running away from a fight.

It was a consolation to have his brother's company, as far as anything could console him, though he could not make up his mind for some time to confide in Ippolito, who had always laughed at him for not marrying, and who could probably not understand why he had now allowed himself to fall in love with one of the very few young women in the world whom he might be prevented from marrying. He was grave and silent as he put together a few books in his own room, vaguely wondering whether he should ever read them.

Ippolito was collecting a number of loose sheets of music that lay on the piano, on a chair beside it, on the table among Orsino's things, and even on the floor under the instrument. He had taken off his cassock, because it was warm, and he wore a grey silk jacket which contrasted oddly with his black silk stockings and clerical stock. From time to time, without taking his cigar from his lips, he hummed a few notes of a melody in the thin but tuneful voice which seems to belong to so many musicians and composers, interrupting himself presently and blowing a cloud of smoke into the air. Now and then he looked at Orsino as though expecting him to speak.

At last, having got his manuscript music into some sort of order, he sat down at the piano to rest himself by expressing an idea he had in his head.

'How glad you will be not to hear a piano at Camaldoli,' he said, stopping as suddenly as he had begun.

'It is a horrible instrument,' Orsino said, 'but it never disturbs me, and it seems to amuse you.'

Ippolito laughed.

'That is what you always say, but I know you will be glad to be rid of it, and it will do me good to play the organ at Santa Vittoria for a change. As that is three-quarters of a mile away, it will not disturb you.'

'Nothing disturbs me,' replied Orsino, rather sadly.

Ippolito made up his mind to speak at last.

'Orsino,' be began quietly, 'I know all about you and Donna Vittoria. As we are going to be so much together, it is better that I should tell you so. I hate secrets, and I would rather not make a secret of knowing yours—if it is one.'

Orsino had looked round sharply when the priest had first spoken, but had then gone back to what he was doing.

'I am glad you know,' he said, 'though I would not have told you. I have spoken to our father and mother about it. The one calls me a fool, and the other thinks me one. They are not very encouraging. As for her family, her mother curses me for having killed her favourite son, and her brothers pretend that she is mad and then intrench themselves behind her to say that it is impossible. I do not blame them much—Heaven knows, I do not blame her at all. All the same, Vittoria and I love each other. It is an impossible situation. I cannot even see her to say goodbye. I wish I could find a way out of it!' He laughed bitterly.

'I wish I could,' echoed his brother. 'But I am only a priest, and you call me a dilettante churchman, at that. Let us see. Let us argue the case as though we were in the theological school. No—I am serious—you need not frown. How many things can happen? Three, I think. There are three conceivable terminations. Either you part for ever and forget each other—'

'You may eliminate that,' observed Orsino.

'Very well. Or else you continue to love each other, in which event you must either succeed in getting married, or not, and those are the other two cases.'

'One does not need to be a theologian to see that. Similarly a man must either live or die, and a door must be either open or shut, on pain of not being a door at all.'

'I have not finished,' objected Ippolito. 'In fact, I have only begun. For the sake of argument, we will assume first that you continue to love each other, but cannot get married.'

'That is the present position.'

'It is not a position which usually lasts long. At the end of a certain time you will naturally cease to love each other, and we obtain a second time the case which you at first eliminated.'

'Eliminate it again,' said Orsino gravely.

'Very well. There remains only one possible issue, after your eliminations. You must be married. On any other assumption you will forget each other. Now in such cases as yours, how do people act? You are a layman, and it is your business to know.'

'When both are of age they "respectfully require" their respective parents to give their consent. If it is refused, they marry and the law protects them.'

'So does the church,' said the priest. 'But it does not provide them with an income afterwards, nor in any way guarantee them against the consequences of family quarrels. Those are subdivisions of the case which you can neither modify nor eliminate.'

'Well,' said Orsino wearily, 'what do you conclude for all this?'

Ippolito's gentle face grew suddenly grave, and seemed squarer and more like his brother's.

'From what I know of the world,' he answered, 'I conclude that men who mean to do things, do them, and let the consequences take care of themselves. If you mean to marry Vittoria d'Oriani, you will marry her, without any help and without anyone's advice. If you do not mean to marry her, you will not, because, under the circumstances, she can assuredly not marry you, as women have been known to marry husbands almost against their will.'

'You have a singularly direct way of putting things,' observed Orsino, thoughtfully.

'That is simply the result of your eliminations,' answered the priest. 'If you do not love her enough to take her in spite of everything and everybody, you must restore into the list of possibilities the certainty that before long you will not love her at all. For I conceive that half a love is no better as a basis of warfare than half a faith. I do not mean to breed war with our father and mother. That is a serious matter. I am only pursuing the matter to its logical conclusion and end, in words, as you will have to do in your acts, sooner or later.'

'Meanwhile I am doing nothing,' said Orsino. 'And I am horribly conscious that I am doing nothing.'

'You are going away,' remarked Ippolito. 'That is not inaction.'

'It is worse than inaction—it is far worse than doing nothing at all.'

'I am not so sure of that. It is sometimes a good thing to force an interval between events. In the first place, I often hear it said that a separation strengthens a great passion, but destroys a small one. All passions seem great when the object is present, but distance brings out the truth. By the time you have been a month at Camaldoli you will know whether it is essential to your happiness to marry Vittoria d'Oriani, or not.'

'And suppose that it is? We come back to the same situation again.'

'Yes—we come back to the eternal situation of force against force.'

'And you mean that I should use force? That is—that I should marry her and take all the consequences, no matter what they may be?'

'I do not mean that you should. I distinguish. I mean that you will, that is all. I am not considering the moral ground of the action, but the human source of it. Your marriage may be the cause of great difficulties and complications, but if you are persuaded that it is quite necessary to your life to marry that young lady, you will marry her. It is by no means an impossible thing to accomplish, nor even a very difficult one.'

'You do not tell me how far it is a matter of conscience to consider the consequences.'

'It is of no use to tell courageous men that sort of thing,' said the priest. 'They take the consequences, that is all. No man who ever wanted a thing with his whole heart ever stopped to consider how his getting it would affect other people, unless the point of honour was involved.'

'And there is no point of honour here, is there?' asked Orsino, as a man asks a question to which he knows the answer.

'You know what you have said to Donna Vittoria,' answered Ippolito. 'I do not.'

'I have asked her to marry me, and she has consented.' Orsino laughed a little drily. 'That is the way one puts it, I believe,' he added.

'Then I should say that unless she, of her own accord, releases you from your word, the point of honour lies in not withdrawing it,' replied the priest. 'If you did, it would mean that you were not willing to take the risks involved in keeping it, would it not?'

'Of course it would. I wish you could make our father see that.'

'People of the previous generation never see what happens in ours. They only infer what ought to happen if all their own prejudices had been canonical law for fifty years.'

'That is sedition,' laughed Orsino, whose spirits had risen suddenly.

'No, it is criticism, and criticism is only called sedition under despotic governments. There is no reason why grown men, like you and me, should not criticise their fathers and mothers up to a certain point, within limits of respect. We honour them, but they are not gods, that we should worship them. When we were little boys we supposed that our father knew everything about everything. We are aware, now, that we understand many things which have grown up in our day much better than he does. To go on supposing that he knew everything, in spite of evidence, would be a gross form of superstition. Superstition, I suppose, means a survival, to wit, the survival of some obsolete belief. That is exactly what it would be in us to artificially maintain the belief of our childhood in our parents' omniscience. Has your love for Donna Vittoria anything to do with the actual amount of her knowledge at any moment? No. But love appears to be made up of passion and affection. Therefore affection is independent of any such knowledge in its object. Therefore we love our parents quite independently of what they know or do not know about life, or mathematics, and we may, consequently, criticise such knowledge in them on its own merits, without in the least detracting from our affection for themselves.'

'You are a very satisfactory brother,' said Orsino, smiling at his brother's speech. 'But I am not sure that you are a strictly orthodox priest on the question of family relations.'

'I give you a theory of such relations,' answered Ippolito. 'In actual practice I believe that our mother is one of the wisest women living, without being in the smallest degree intellectual. It is true that my experience of women is limited, but I hear a great deal of talk about them. She is fond of Donna Vittoria, I am sure.'

'Yes—very. But she sees fifty reasons why I had better not marry her.'

'So do I,' said Ippolito, calmly.

'You? Why, you have been urging me to marry her in spite of everything!'

'Oh no. I have only proved to you that if you love her enough, you will marry her in spite of everything. That is a very different thing.'

'Priest!' laughed Orsino. 'Sophist!'

'Anything you like,' answered Ippolito, swinging round on the piano-stool and striking a chord. 'All the same, I hope you may marry her, and have no bad consequences to deal with, and I will help you if I can.'

'Thank you,' said Orsino; but his voice was drowned by a burst of loud and intricate music, as Ippolito's white fingers flew over the piano while he stared at the ceiling, his head thrown back, his cigar sticking up from between his teeth, he himself apparently unaware of what his hands were doing, and merely listening to the music.

Orsino was momentarily cheered and encouraged by all his brother had said, but the situation was not materially improved thereby. It was, indeed, almost as bad as it could be, and an older and wiser man than Orsino would have expected that something must occur before long, either to improve it, or to cut it short at once and for ever, for the simple reason that it could neither last, as it stood, nor be made more difficult by anything which could happen.