Atone!" she cried, and her voice trembled. "Go then, and atone. But
never let me see you more; never let me be reminded of the sinner to
whom I have given life. Go! Begone!" And she raised a hand in tragical
dismissal.

I shrank back, and came slowly to my feet. And then Gervasio spoke, and
his voice boomed and thundered with righteous indignation.

"Madonna, this is inhuman!" he denounced. "Shall you dare to hope for
mercy being yourself unmerciful?"

"I shall pray for strength to forgive him; but the sight of him might
tempt me back with the memory of the thing that he has done," she
answered, and she had returned to that cold and terrible reserve of
hers.

And then things that Fra Gervasio had repressed for years welled up in a
mighty flood. "He is your son, and he is as you have made him."

"As I have made him?" quoth she, and her glance challenged the friar.

"By what right did you make of him a votive offering? By what right
did you seek to consecrate a child unborn to a claustral life without
thought of his character, without reck of the desires that should be
his? By what right did you make yourself the arbiter of the future of a
man unborn?"

"By what right?" quoth she. "Are you a priest, and do you ask me by what
right I vowed him to the service of God?"

"And is there, think you, no way of serving God but in the sterility of
the cloister?" he demanded. "Why, since no man is born to damnation,
and since by your reasoning the world must mean damnation, then all men
should be encloistered, and soon, thus, there would be an end to man.
You are too arrogant, Madonna, when you presume to judge what pleases
God. Beware lest you fall into the sin of the Pharisee, for often have I
seen you stand in danger of it."

She swayed as if her strength were failing her, and again her pale lips
moved.

"Enough, Fra Gervasio! I will go," I cried.

"Nay, it is not yet enough," he answered, and strode down the room until
he stood between her and me. "He is what you have made him," he repeated
in denunciation. "Had you studied his nature and his inclinations, had
you left them free to develop along the way that God intended, you would
have seen whether or not the cloister called him; and then would have
been the time to have taken a resolve. But you thought to change his
nature by repressing it; and you never saw that if he was not such as
you would have him be, then most surely would you doom him to damnation
by maki