"When the
duties of the Council press me less," he thought, "I will seek him out
and reason with him."
But after that night the gentle friar was seen no more in Venice, and
inquiry failed to develop a reason for his flight. They missed him in
the Servi, where already they were beginning to gather up the pale
happenings of his convent life with the kindly recollection which tinged
them with a thread of romance, as his brothers of the order rehearsed
them in the cloistered ways where he would come no more; for to him some
ministry of beauty had always been assigned. The vines drooped for his
tending, they said; and the pet stork who wandered in the close
languished for his hand to feed the dainty morsel, and for his voice in
that indulgent teasing which had provoked its proudest preening.
But this, perhaps, was only fancy, or their way of recognizing a certain
grace they missed. But of the reason of his going, which most of them
connected in some way with this movement in Venice over which he had
often grieved, there was no open recognition among them--partly because
they feared that ubiquitous ear of the Senate, which penetrated unseen
through many closed doorways, partly because they realized how strange
it was that their own sympathies had not confessed his view of right.
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