e true. I did
sit beside her. The child was troubled. I comforted her. Where was the
harm?"

"The harm?" quoth he. "And you had your arm about her--and you to be a
priest one day?"

"And why not, pray?" quoth I. "Is this some new sin that you have
discovered--or that you have kept hidden from me until now? To
console the afflicted is an ordination of Mother Church; to love our
fellow-creatures an ordination of our Blessed Lord Himself. I was
performing both. Am I to be abused for that?"

He looked at me very searchingly, seeking in my countenance--as I
now know--some trace of irony or guile. Finding none, he turned to my
mother. He was very solemn.

"Madonna," he said quietly, "I think that Agostino is nearer to being a
saint than either you or I will ever get."

She looked at him, first in surprise, then very sadly. Slowly she shook
her head. "Unhappily for him there is another arbiter of saintship, Who
sees deeper than do you, Gervasio."

He bowed his head. "Better not to look deep enough than to do as you
seem in danger of doing, Madonna, and by looking too deep imagine things
which do not exist."

"Ah, you will defend him against reason even," she complained. "His
anger exists. His thirst to kill--to stamp himself with the brand of
Cain--exists. He confesses that himself. His insubordination to me you
have seen for yourself; and that again is sin, for it is ordained that
we shall honour our parents.

"O!" she moaned. "My authority is all gone. He is beyond my control. He
has shaken off the reins by which I sought to guide him."

"You had done well to have taken my advice a year ago, Madonna. Even now
it is not too late. Let him go to Pavia, to the Sapienza, to study his
humanities."

"Out into the world!" she cried in horror. "O, no, no! I have sheltered
him here so carefully!"

"Yet you cannot shelter him for ever," said he. "He must go out into the
world some day."

"He need not," she faltered. "If the call were strong enough within him,
a convent..." She left her sentence unfinished, and looked at me.

"Go, Agostino," she bade me. "Fra Gervasio and I must talk."

I went reluctantly, since in the matter of their talk none could have
had a greater interest than I, seeing that my fate stood in the balance
of it. But I went, none the less, and her last words to me as I was
departing were an injunction that I should spend the time until I should
take up my studies for the day with Fra Gervasio in se