o his master, to the people you are
called to rule. Think for how many generations their unheeded
sufferings, their unrewarded toil, have paid for the pomp and pleasure
of your house! That is the debt you are called on to acquit, the wrong
you are pledged to set right."

Odo was silent. She had found the unanswerable word. Yes, he was called
on to acquit the accumulated debt of that long unrighteous rule: it was
he who must pay, if need be with the last drop of his blood, for the
savage victories of Bracciaforte, the rapacity of Guidobaldo, the
magnificence of Ascanio, the religious terrors and secret vices of the
poor Duke now nearing his end. All these passions had preyed on the
people, on the tillers and weavers and vine-dressers, obscure servants
of a wasteful greatness: theirs had been the blood that renewed the
exhausted veins of their rulers, through generation after generation of
dumb labour and privation. And the noblest passions, as well as the
basest, had been nourished at the same cost. Every flower in the ducal
gardens, every picture on the palace walls, every honour in the ancient
annals of the house, had been planted, paid for, fought for by the
people. With mute inconscient irony the two powers had faced each other
for generations: the subjects never guessing that their sovereigns were
puppets of their own making, the Dukes that all their pomp and
circumstance were but a borrowed motley. Now the evil wrought in
ignorance remained to be undone in the light of the world's new
knowledge: the discovery of that universal brotherhood which Christ had
long ago proclaimed, and which, after so many centuries, those who
denied Christ were the first to put in practice. Hour by hour, day by
day, at the cost of every personal inclination, of all that endears life
and ennobles failure, Odo must set himself to redeem the credit of his
house. He saw his way straight before him; but in that hour of insight
his heart's instinct of self-preservation made one last effort against
fate.

He turned to Fulvia.

"You are right," he said; "I have no choice. You have shown me the way;
but must I travel it alone? You ask me to give up at a stroke all that
makes life desirable: to set forth, without a backward glance, on the
very road that leads me farthest from you! Yesterday I might have
obeyed; but how can I turn today from this near view of my happiness?"

He paused a moment and she seemed about to answer; but he hurried on