ng an evil priest of him.

"In your Pharisaic arrogance, Madonna, you sought to superimpose your
will to God's will concerning him--you confounded God's will with your
own. And so his sins recoil upon you as much as upon any. Therefore,
Madonna, do I bid you beware. Take a humbler view if you would be
acceptable in the Divine sight. Learn to forgive, for I say to you
to-day that you stand as greatly in need of forgiveness for the thing
that Agostino has done, as does Agostino himself."

He paused at last, and stood trembling before her, his eyes aflame, his
high cheek-bones faintly tinted. And she measured him very calmly and
coldly with her sombre eyes.

"Are you a priest?" she asked with steady scorn. "Are you indeed a
priest?" And then her invective was loosened, and her voice shrilled and
mounted as her anger swayed her. "What a snake have I harboured here!"
she cried. "Blasphemer! You show me clearly whence came the impiety and
ungodliness of Giovanni d'Anguissola. It had the same source as your
own. It was suckled at your mother's breast."

A sob shook him. "My mother is dead, Madonna!" he rebuked her.

"She is more blessed, then, than I; since she has not lived to see what
a power for sin she has brought forth. Go, pitiful friar. Go, both of
you. You are very choicely mated. Begone from Mondolfo, and never let me
see either of you more."

She staggered to her great chair and sank into it, whilst we stood
there, mute, regarding her. For myself, it was with difficulty that I
repressed the burning things that rose to my lips. Had I given free rein
to my tongue, I had made of it a whip of scorpions. And my anger sprang
not from the things she said to me, but from what she said to that
saintly man who held out a hand to help me out of the morass of sin in
which I was being sunk. That he, that sweet and charitable follower of
his Master, should be abused by her, should be dubbed blasphemer
and have the cherished memory of his mother defiled by her pietistic
utterances, was something that inflamed me horribly.

But he set a hand upon my shoulder.

"Come, Agostino," he said very gently. He was calm once more. "We will
go, as we are bidden, you and I."

And then, out of the sweetness of his nature, he forged all unwittingly
the very iron that should penetrate most surely into her soul.

"Forgive her, my son. Forgive her as you need forgiveness. She does not
understand the thing she does. Come, we will pray for