e
crying:

"My lord, my lord! God help me, and God help you!" An hour later he
had left the citadel, and on the stones of the courtyard lay ten golden
ducats which he had scattered there, and which not one of the greedy
grooms or serving-men could take courage to pick up, so fearful a curse
had old Falcone laid upon that money when he cast it from him.

CHAPTER III. THE PIETISTIC THRALL

That evening my mother talked to me at longer length than I remember her
ever to have done before.

It may be that she feared lest Gino Falcone should have aroused in me
notions which it was best to lull back at once into slumber. It may be
that she, too, had felt something of the crucial quality of that moment
in the armoury, just as she must have perceived my first hesitation to
obey her slightest word, whence came her resolve to check this mutiny
ere it should spread and become too big for her.

We sat in the room that was called her private dining-room, but which,
in fact, was all things to her save the chamber in which she slept.

The fine apartments through which I had strayed as a little lad in my
father's day, the handsome lofty chambers, with their frescoed ceilings,
their walls hung with costly tapestries, many of which had come from the
looms of Flanders, their floors of wood mosaics, and their great carved
movables, had been shut up these many years.

For my mother's claustral needs sufficient was provided by the alcove
in which she slept, the private chapel of the citadel in which she would
spend long hours, and this private dining-room where we now sat. Into
the spacious gardens of the castle she would seldom wander, into
our town of Mondolfo never. Not since my father's departure upon his
ill-starred rebellion had she set foot across the drawbridge.

"Tell me whom you go with, and I will tell you what you are," says the
proverb. "Show me your dwelling, and I shall see your character," say I.

And surely never was there a chamber so permeated by the nature of its
tenant as that private dining-room of my mother's.

It was a narrow room in the shape of a small parallelogram, with the
windows set high up near the timbered, whitewashed ceiling, so that it
was impossible either to look in or to look out, as is sometimes the
case with the windows of a chapel.

On the white space of wall that faced the door hung a great wooden
Crucifix, very rudely carved by one who either knew nothing of anatomy,
or else--as