o in attendance and Rinolfo slinking
behind his father, leering.

CHAPTER V. REBELLION

The sight of my mother startled me more than I can say. It filled me
with a positive dread of things indefinable. Never before had I seen
her coldly placid countenance so strangely disordered, and her unwonted
aspect it must have been that wrought so potently upon me.

No longer was she the sorrowful spectre, white-faced, with downcast eyes
and level, almost inanimate, tones. Her cheeks were flushed unnaturally,
her lips were quivering, and angry fires were smouldering in her
deep-set eyes.

Swiftly she came down to us, seeming almost to glide over the ground.
Not me she addressed, but poor Luisina; and her voice was hoarse with an
awful anger.

"Who are you, wench?" quoth she. "What make you here in Mondolfo?"

Luisina had risen and stood swaying there, very white and with averted
eyes, her hands clasping and unclasping. Her lips moved; but she was
too terrified to answer. It was Giojoso who stepped forward to inform my
mother of the girl's name and condition. And upon learning it her anger
seemed to increase.

"A kitchen-wench!" she cried. "O horror!"

And quite suddenly, as if by inspiration, scarce knowing what I said or
that I spoke at all, I answered her out of the store of the theological
learning with which she had had me stuffed.

"We are all equals in the sight of God, madam mother."

She flashed me a glance of anger, of pious anger than which none can be
more terrible.

"Blasphemer!" she denounced me. "What has God to do with this?"

She waited for no answer, rightly judging, perhaps, that I had none to
offer.

"And as for that wanton," she commanded, turning fiercely to Giojoso,
"let her be whipped hence and out of the town of Mondolfo. Set the
grooms to it."

But upon that command of hers I leapt of a sudden to my feet, a
tightening about my heart, and beset by a certain breathlessness that
turned me pale.

Here again, it seemed, was to be repeated--though with methods a
thousand times more barbarous and harsh--the wrong that was done years
ago in the case of poor Gino Falcone. And the reason for it in this
instance was not even dimly apparent to me. Falcone I had loved; indeed,
in my eighteen years of life he was the only human being who had knocked
for admission upon the portals of my heart. Him they had driven forth.
And now, here was a child--the fairest creature of God's that until that