e to the pitiless beating of
the sun, and suffering Heaven alone can say what agonies. The murmuring
crowd looked up in mingled fear and sympathy.

He had been there since last night, a peasant girl informed us, and he
had been confined there by order of my Lord the Cardinal-legate for the
odious sin of sacrilege.

"What!" I cried out, in such a tone of astonished indignation that Monna
Giuliana seized my arm and pressed it to enjoin prudence.

It was not until she had made her purchases in a shop under the Duomo
and we were returning home that I touched upon the matter. She chid me
for the lack of caution that might have led me into some unpardonable
indiscretions but for her warning.

"But the very thought of such a man as my Lord Gambara torturing a poor
wretch for sacrilege!" I cried. "It is grotesque; it is ludicrous; it is
infamous!"

"Not so loud," she laughed. "You are being stared at." And then she
delivered herself of an amazing piece of casuistry. "If a man being
a sinner himself, shall on that account refrain from punishing sin in
others, then is he twice a sinner."

"It was my Lord Gambara taught you that," said I, and involuntarily I
sneered.

She considered me with a very searching look.

"Now, what precisely do you mean, Agostino?"

"Why, that it is by just such sophistries that the Cardinal-legate seeks
to cloak the disorders of his life. 'Video meliora proboque, deteriora
sequor?' is his philosophy. If he would encage the most sacrilegious
fellow in Piacenza, let him encage himself."

"You do not love him?" said she.

"O--as to that--as a man he is well enough. But as an ecclesiastic...O,
but there!" I broke off shortly, and laughed. "The devil take Messer
Gambara!"

She smiled. "It is greatly to be feared that he will."

But my Lord Gambara was not so lightly to be dismissed that afternoon.
As we were passing the Porta Fodesta, a little group of country-folk
that had gathered there fell away before us, all eyes upon the dazzling
beauty of Giuliana--as, indeed, had been the case ever since we had come
into the town, so that I had been singularly and sweetly proud of being
her escort. I had been conscious of the envious glances that many a
tall fellow had sent after me, though, after all, theirs was but as the
jealousy of Phoebus for Adonis.

Wherever we had passed and eyes had followed us, men and women had
fallen to whispering and pointing after us. And so did they now, here at
the