CHAPTER VI
Gigia's Opinion
The aged monk of St. Apollinare, after watching Paolina as she
departed from the Basilica, and took the path towards the forest,
returned into the church to his devotions at the altar of the saint,
as has been said. But he found himself unable to concentrate his
attention as usual, not on the meaning of the words of the litanies
he uttered,--that, it may be imagined, few such worshippers do, or
even attempt to do,--but on such devotional thoughts as, on other
occasions, constituted his mental attitude during the hours he spent
before the altar.
He could not prevent his mind from straying to thoughts of the girl
who had just left him; of certain long-sleeping recollections of his
own past, which her name had recalled to him; of her very manifest
emotion at the sight of the couple in the bagarino, and the too easy
interpretation of the meaning of that emotion; and specially of her
implied intention of taking the same route that they had taken.
He thought of these things, and a certain sense of uneasiness and
misgiving came over him. The young artist had spoken kindly and
sweetly to him. She had seemed to him wonderfully pretty,--and that
is not without its influence even on eyes over which the cowl had
been drawn for more than three-score years; she was a fellow-
Venetian too,--and that with Italians, who find themselves in a
stranger city, is a stronger tie of fellowship than the people of
less divided nations can readily appreciate; and, above all, there
were motives connected with those awakened remembrances of the old
man which made her an object of interest to him.
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