in feudal homes. That her having abolished it was an
act of humility on her part there can be little doubt, although this was
a subject upon which she never expressed herself in my hearing.

The walls of that room were whitewashed and bare.

The floor was of stone overlain by a carpet of rushes that was changed
no oftener than once a week.

From what I have told you, you may picture something of the chill gloom
of the place, something of the pietism which hung upon the very air of
that apartment in which so much of my early youth was spent. And it had,
too, an odour that is peculiarly full of character, the smell which
is never absent from a sacristy and rarely from conventual chambers; a
smell difficult to define, faint and yet tenuously pungent, and like
no other smell in all the world that I have ever known. It is a musty
odour, an odour of staleness which perhaps an open window and the fresh
air of heaven might relieve but could not dissipate; and to this is wed,
but so subtly that it would be impossible to say which is predominant,
the slight, sickly aroma of wax.

We supped there that night in silence at about the hour that poor Gino
Falcone would be taking his departure. Silence was habitual with us at
meal-times, eating being performed--like everything else in that drab
household--as a sort of devotional act. Occasionally the silence would
be relieved by readings aloud from some pious work, undertaken at my
mother's bidding by one or another of the amanuenses.

But on the night in question there was just silence, broken chiefly by
the toothless slobber of the castellan over the soft meats that were
especially prepared for him. And there was something of grimness in
that silence; for none--and Fra Gervasio less than any--approved the
unchristian thing that out of excess of Christianity my mother had done
in driving old Falcone forth.

Myself, I could not eat at all. My misery choked me. The thought of that
old servitor whom I had loved being sent a wanderer and destitute, and
all through my own weakness, all because I had failed him in his need,
just as I had failed myself, was anguish to me. My lip would quiver at
the thought, and it was with difficulty that I repressed my tears.

At last that hideous repast came to an end in prayers of thanksgiving
whose immoderate length was out of all proportion to the fare provided.

The castellan shuffled forth upon the arm of the seneschal; Lorenza
followed at a s