My father smiled sometimes, but he did
not interfere. He was a devout man, though he was a soldier. I had some
facility for learning, also, and was fond of all books. My mother died
when I was four years old.
"I need not tell how the devout passion increased in me as I grew older.
I passed through all the stages of such development very quickly. My
father believed that I had a true vocation for the Church, and yielding
to my entreaties and to the advice of his friends, who told him that he
could never make a soldier of such a boy, he allowed me to enter a
seminary. I was very happy, and my love of books and my earnest desire
to be a priest continued to increase. I was made a deacon and received
the tonsure. Then I fell ill. It was the will of Heaven, for I never was
ill before that, nor have been since. It was a long illness, a dangerous
fever. Just before that time, while I was in the seminary, my father had
married a second time, a young and very beautiful woman, scarcely two
years older than I. They both took care of me, and she was very kind and
liked me from the first.
"I loved her. That was perhaps an illness also, for I never suffered in
that way again. It was very terrible, for I knew what a great sin it was
to love my father's wife. I never told her that I loved her, and she was
always the same, kind and good. My heart was red-hot iron in my breast,
day and night, and it was very long before I was really well again.
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