and with France against the Republic of Genoa.  Better still he liked to hear of the Marquess Gualberto, who had been the Duke of Milan’s ally and had brought home the great Milanese painter to adorn his banqueting-room at Donnaz.  The lords of Donnaz had never been noted for learning, and Odo’s grandfather was fond of declaring that a nobleman need not be a scholar; but the great Marquess Gualberto, if himself unlettered, had been the patron of poets and painters and had kept learned clerks to write down the annals of his house on parchment painted by the monks.  These annals were locked in the archives, under Don Gervaso’s care; but Odo learned from the old servant that some of the great Marquess’s books had lain for years on an upper shelf in the vestry off the chapel; and here one day, with Bruno’s aid, the little boy dislodged from a corner behind the missals and altar-books certain sheepskin volumes clasped in blackened silver.  The comeliest of these, which bore on their title-page a dolphin curled about an anchor, were printed in unknown characters; but on opening the smaller volumes Odo felt the same joyous catching of the breath as when he had stepped out on the garden-terrace at Pianura.  For here indeed were gates leading to a land of delectation:  the country of the giant Morgante, the enchanted island of Avillion, the court of the Soldan and the King’s palace at Camelot.

In this region Odo spent many blissful hours.  His fancy ranged in the wake of heroes and adventurers who, for all he knew, might still be feasting and fighting north of the Alps, or might any day with a blast of their magic horns summon the porter to the gates of Donnaz.  Foremost among them, a figure towering above even Rinaldo, Arthur and the Emperor Frederic, was that Conrad, father of Conradin, whose sayings are set down in the old story-book of the Cento Novelle, “the flower of gentle speech.”  There was one tale of King Conrad that the boy never forgot:  how the King, in his youth, had always about him a company of twelve lads of his own age; how when Conrad did wrong, his governors, instead of punishing him, beat his twelve companions; and how, on the young King’s asking what the lads were being punished for, the pedagogues replied: 

“For your Majesty’s offences.”

“And why do you punish my companions instead of me?”

“Because you are our lord and master,” he was told.

At this the King fell to thinking, and thereafter, it is said, in pity for those who must suffer in his stead he set close watch on himself, lest his sinning should work harm to others.  This was the story of King Conrad; and much as Odo loved the clash of arms and joyous feats of paladins rescuing fair maids in battle, yet Conrad’s seemed to him, even then, a braver deed than these.