he Sacred College as it really was; not the very home
and fount of Christianity, as I had deemed it, controlled and guided
by men of a sublime saintliness of ways, but a gathering of ambitious
worldlings, who had become so brazen in their greed of temporal power
that they did not even trouble to cloak the sin and evil in which they
lived; men in whom the spirit that had actuated those saints the study
of whose lives had been my early delight, lived no more than it might
live in the bosom of a harlot.

I said so to him one day in a wild, furious access of boldness, in one
of those passionate outbursts that are begotten of illusions blighted.

He heard me through quite calmly, without the least trace of anger,
smiling ever his quiet mocking smile, and plucking at his little, auburn
beard.

"You are wrong, I think," he said. "Say that the Church has fallen
a prey to self-seekers who have entered it under the cloak of the
priesthood. What then? In their hands the Church has been enriched. She
has gained power, which she must retain. And that is to the Church's
good."

"And what of the scandal of it?" I stormed.

"O, as to that--why, boy, have you never read Boccaccio?"

"Never," said I.

"Read him, then," he urged me. "He will teach you much that you need
to know. And read in particular the story of Abraam, the Jew, who upon
visiting Rome was so scandalized by the licence and luxury of the
clergy that he straightway had himself baptized and became a Christian,
accounting that a religion that could survive such wiles of Satan to
destroy it must indeed be the true religion, divinely inspired." He
laughed his little cynical laugh to see my confusion increased by that
bitter paradox.

It is little wonder that I was all bewildered, that I was like some poor
mariner upon unknown waters, without stars or compass.

Thus that summer ebbed slowly, and the time of my projected minor
ordination approached. Messer Gambara's visits to Fifanti's grew more
and more frequent, until they became a daily occurrence; and now my
cousin Cosimo came oftener too. But it was their custom to come in the
forenoon, when I was at work with Fifanti. And often I observed the
doctor to be oddly preoccupied, and to spend much time in creeping to
the window that was all wreathed in clematis, and in peeping through
that purple-decked green curtain into the garden where his excellency
and Cosimo walked with Monna Giuliana.

When both visitors were