he significance of the days they had spent together in the
monastery of Monte Cassino. The association of ideas brought before him
the profound sense of responsibility with which, at that time, he had
looked forward to such an hour as this.

The abate was watching him gravely.

"Cavaliere," he said, "every instant counts, all you had once hoped to
do for Pianura is now yours to accomplish. But in your absence your
enemies are not idle. His Highness may revoke your appointment at any
hour. Of late I have had his ear, but I have now been near a week
absent, and you know the Duke is not long constant to one
purpose.--Cavaliere," he exclaimed, "I appeal to you not in the name of
the God whom you have come to doubt, but in that of your fellow-men,
whom you have wished to serve."

Odo looked at him, not without a confused sense of the irony of such an
appeal on such lips, yet with the distinct consciousness that it was
uttered in all sincerity, and that, whatever their superficial diversity
of view, he and de Crucis were at one on those deeper questions that
gave the moment its real significance.

"It is impossible," he repeated, "that I should go with you."

De Crucis was again silent, and Odo was aware of the renewed intentness
of his scrutiny. "If the lady--" broke from him once; but he checked
himself and took a turn in the room.

Meanwhile a resolve was slowly forming itself in Odo. He would not be
false to the call which, since his boyhood, had so often made itself
heard before the voice of pleasure and self-interest; but he would at
least reserve the right to obey it in his own fashion and under
conditions which left his private inclination free.

"There may be more than one way of serving one's fellows," he said
quietly. "Go back without me, abate. Tell my cousin that I resign my
rights to the succession. I shall live my own life elsewhere, not
unworthily, I hope, but as a private person."

De Crucis had turned pale. For a moment his habitual self-command seemed
about to fail him; and Odo could not but see that a sincere personal
regret was mingled with the political agent's consciousness of failure.

He himself was chiefly aware of a sense of relief, of self-recovery, as
though he had at last solved a baffling enigma and found himself once
more at one with his fate.

Suddenly he heard a step behind him. Fulvia had re-entered the room. She
had put off her drenched cloak, but the hair lay in damp strands on