ience, AEsop began his narrative.

"There are," he said, "now living three noble gentlemen in the first
flush of youth, in the first flight of greatness, young, handsome,
brilliant, more like brothers than friends. They are known in the noble
world of the court as the three Louis, because by a curious chance each
of these splendid gentlemen carries Louis for a Christian name. Humorists
have been known to speak of them as the three Louis d'or. The first is
none other than our good king's person, Louis of Bourbon, thirteenth
monarch of his name; the second is Louis, Duke of Nevers; the third is
his cousin, Louis of Mantua, Prince of Gonzague."

He paused for a moment, looking with the satisfaction of a tale-teller at
the expectant faces before him, and as he paused an approving murmur from
his audience urged him to continue. AEsop resumed his narration.

"You will ask how the Italianate Mantuan comes to be a cousin of our
French Nevers, and I will tell you. Nevers's father, Louis de Nevers, the
twelfth duke, had a very beautiful sister, who was foolish enough, or
wise enough, as you may choose to take it, to fall in love with a needy
Italian nobleman that came adventuring to Paris in the hope of making a
rich marriage. He made a rich marriage, or perhaps it would be more
accurate to say that he thought he made a rich marriage. He married
Mademoiselle de Nevers."

Again AEsop halted, employing one of the familiar devices of rhetoricians,
who lure their hearers to keener interest by such judicious pauses in the
course of their exposition. The listening ruffians were as attentive as
babes at a day-school, and AEsop, with a hideous distortion of his
features, which he intended for a pleased smile, went on with his story:

"Mademoiselle de Nevers had some fortune of her own, of course, but it
was not large; it was not the feast for which the amative Mantuan had
hungered. The Nevers's fortune was in the duke's hands, and remained in
the duke's hands, for the duke married at much the same time as his
sister; and the duke's wife and Gonzague's wife were brought to bed much
about the same time, and each bore a son, and each son was named Louis
after the twelfth duke, out of the affection his wife bore him, out of
the affection his sister bore him, and out of the affection that sister's
Mantuan husband pretended, in his sly Italian manner, to bear him."

A belated patriotism stirring vaguely in Faenza's muddled mind tempted
hi