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.

Furtively, too, the friars watched Fra Paolo; for the adoration of the
gentle Fra Francesco for this idol of their order, from the day when
they had entered the convent as boys together, had formed a cloister
idyl--none the less that the response of the graver friar was not
equally demonstrative, though it was felt to be true; for it was a
marvel that two such opposite natures should hold so closely together
and that Fra Francesco, for all his gentleness, should apparently retain
opinions uninfluenced by the power and learning which all others
recognized.

Yet, from those early days, Fra Francesco had abated nothing of his
scrupulous and loving conservatism; never had he questioned a rule, nor
chosen the least, instead of the most, permitted in an act of humility;
and after his Church, the Madonna, and his patron saint, he expended the
devotion of his nature upon his friend with a just estimate of his power
and daring which filled his soul with anxious happiness. Often, in
those earlier days, when the echoes of Fra Paolo's triumphs had
penetrated to the refectory of the Servi, Fra Francesco had felt a
strange premonition which had kept him long on his knees before the
altar in the chapel. "Shield him, O Holy Mother, from danger," he had
prayed, "nor let him wander from the lowly path of obedience for pride
of that which thou permittest him to know!" And his day-dream of earthly
happiness was the spending of his friend's great gifts in the service of
the Holy Church, wherein he should ascend from honor to honor, enlarging
her borders and strengthening her rule, attaining at last to the supreme
position.

Weeks after Fra Francesco had disappeared from the convent