ereavement! My heart is quite overwhelmed, these newspapers have again
just upset me with the fresh details they give!" He pointed as he spoke
to the papers scattered over the table. Then with a gesture he strove to
brush aside the gloomy story, and banish that vision of Benedetta dead,
which had been haunting him. "Well, and yourself?" he inquired.

"I am leaving this evening," replied Pierre, "but I did not wish to quit
Rome without pressing your brave hands."

"You are leaving? But your book?"

"My book--I have been received by the Holy Father, I have made my
submission and reprobated my book."

Orlando looked fixedly at the priest. There was a short interval of
silence, during which their eyes told one another all that they had to
tell respecting the affair. Neither felt the necessity of any longer
explanation. The old man merely spoke these concluding words: "You have
done well, your book was a chimera."

"Yes, a chimera, a piece of childishness, and I have condemned it myself
in the name of truth and reason."

A smile appeared on the dolorous lips of the impotent hero. "Then you
have seen things, you understand and know them now?"

"Yes, I know them; and that is why I did not wish to go off without
having that frank conversation with you which we agreed upon."

Orlando was delighted, but all at once he seemed to remember the young
fellow who had opened the door to Pierre, and who had afterwards modestly
resumed his seat on a chair near the window. This young fellow was a
youth of twenty, still beardless, of a blonde handsomeness such as
occasionally flowers at Naples, with long curly hair, a lily-like
complexion, a rosy mouth, and soft eyes full of a dreamy languor. The old
man presented him in fatherly fashion, Angiolo Mascara his name was, and
he was the grandson of an old comrade in arms, the epic Mascara of the
Thousand, who had died like a hero, his body pierced by a hundred wounds.

"I sent for him to scold him," continued Orlando with a smile. "Do you
know that this fine fellow with his girlish airs goes in for the new
ideas? He is an Anarchist, one of the three or four dozen Anarchists that
we have in Italy. He's a good little lad at bottom, he has only his
mother left him, and supports her, thanks to the little berth which he
holds, but which he'll lose one of these fine days if he is not careful.
Come, come, my child, you must promise me to be reasonable."

Thereupon Angiolo, whose clean but we