“And a pious old fool to boot!” said the Dean, impatiently.  “But I am willing—­like St. Paul and my betters—­to be a fool for Christ’s sake.  Lady Tranmore, are you or are you not a Christian?”

“I hope so,” she said, with composure, while her cheek flushed.  “But our Lord did not ask impossibilities.  He knew there were limits to human endurance—­and human pardon—­though there might be none to God’s.”

“‘Be ye perfect, as your Father which is in heaven is perfect,’” cried the Dean.  “Where are the limits there?”

“There are other duties in life besides that to a wife who has betrayed her husband,” she said, steadily.  “You ask of William what he has not the strength to give.  His life was wrecked, and he has pieced it together again.  And now he has given it to his country.  That poor, guilty child has no claim upon it.”

“But understand,” said Ashe, interposing, with an energy that seemed to express the whole man—­“while I live, everything—­short of what you ask—­that can be done to protect or ease her, shall be done.  Tell her that.”

His features worked painfully.  The Dean took up his hat and stick.

“And may I tell her, too,” he said, pausing—­“that you forgive her?”

Ashe hesitated.

“I do not believe,” he said, at last, “that she would attach any more meaning to that word than I do.  She would think it unreal.  What’s done is done.”

The Dean’s heart leaped up in the typical Christian challenge to the fatal and the irrevocable.  While life lasts the lost sheep can always be sought and found; and love, the mystical wine, can always be poured into the wounds of the soul, healing and recreating!  But he said no more.  He felt himself humiliated and defeated.

Ashe and Lady Tranmore took leave of him with an extreme gentleness and affection.  He would almost rather they had treated him ill.  Yes, he was an optimist and a dreamer!—­one who had, indeed, never grappled in his own person with the worst poisons and corrosions of the soul.  Yet still, as he passed along the London streets—­marked here and there by the newspaper placards which announced Ashe’s committee triumphs of the night before—­he was haunted anew by the immortal words: 

“One thing thou lackest,” ... and “Come, follow me!”

* * * * *

Ah!—­could he have done such a thing himself? or was he merely the scribe carelessly binding on other men’s shoulders things grievous to be borne?  The answering passion of his faith mounted within him—­joined with a scorn for the easy conditions and happy, scholarly pursuits of his own life, and a thirst which in the early days of Christendom would have been a thirst for witness and for martyrdom.

* * * * *

Three days later the Dean—­a somewhat shrunken and diminished figure, in ordinary clerical dress, without the buckles and silk stockings that typically belonged to him—­stood once more at the entrance of a small villa outside the Venetian town of Treviso.