left the order with him, she married a husband of her own age and lived for years at a foreign court.  At length she returned to Florence and led her husband one day out through the garden to show him the statues, when for the first time she saw what the sculptor had done and knew for the first time that these dead men had hated one another for her sake; whereupon she let fall one tear which became the source of the fountain.  To me all this part of the story is foolishness:  but that I and Stephanu hate one another not otherwise than those two old kings, and for no very different cause, is God’s truth, cavalier.”

“You are devoted to her, you two?” I asked, tempting him to continue.

He gazed down on me for a moment with immeasurable contempt.

“I give you a figure, and you would put it into words!  Words!” He spat.  “And yet it is the truth, Englishman, that once she called me her second father.  ’Her second father’—­I have repeated that to Stephanu once or twice when I have lost my temper (a rare thing with me).  You should see him turn blue!”

I could get no more out of Marc’antonio that day, nor indeed did the pain I suffered allow me to continue the catechism.  A little before night fell he lifted me again and carried me to a bed of clean-smelling heather and fern he had prepared within the hut; and, all the night through, the slightest moan from me found him alert to give me drink or shift me to an easier posture.  Our total solitude seemed from the first to breed a certain good-fellowship between us:  neither next day nor for many days did he remit or falter in his care for me.  But his manner, though not ungentle, was taciturn.  He seemed to carry about a weight on his mind; his brow wore a constant frown, vexed and unhappy.  Once or twice I caught him talking to himself.

“To be sure it was enough to madden all the saints:  and the Prince is not one of them. . . .”

“What was enough to madden all the saints, O Marc’antonio?” I asked from my bed.

Already he had turned in some confusion, surprised by the sound of his own voice.  He was down on hands and knees, and had been blowing upon the embers of a wood fire, kindled under a pan of goat’s milk.  The goat herself browsed in the sunlight beyond the doorway, in the circuit allowed by a twenty-foot tether.

“What was enough to madden all the saints, O Marc’antonio?”

“Why,” said he, savagely, “your standing up to him and denying his birth and his sister’s before all the crowd.  I did not think that anything could have saved you.”

“If I remember, I added that the Queen Emilia’s bare word would be enough for me.”

“So.  But you denied it on his father’s, and that is what his enemies, the Paolists all, would give their ears to hear—­yes, and Pasquale Paoli himself, though he passes for a just man.”

“Marc’antonio,” said I, seriously, “are the Prince and Princess in truth the children of King Theodore?”