The rapid march of events in France had necessarily produced an opposite effect on minds so differently constituted.  To Fulvia the year had been a year of victory, a glorious affirmation of her political creed.  Step by step she had seen, as in some old allegorical painting, error fly before the shafts of truth.  Where Odo beheld a conflagration she saw a sunrise; and all that was bare and cold in her own life was warmed and transfigured by that ineffable brightness.

She listened patiently while he enlarged on the difficulties of the case.  The constitution was framed in all its details, but with its completion he felt more than ever doubtful of the wisdom of granting it.  He would have welcomed any postponement that did not seem an admission of fear.  He dreaded the inevitable break with the clergy, not so much because of the consequent danger to his own authority, as because he was increasingly conscious of the newness and clumsiness of the instrument with which he proposed to replace their tried and complex system.  He mentioned to Fulvia the rumours of popular disaffection; but she swept them aside with a smile.

“The people mistrust you,” she said.  “And what does that mean?  That you have given your enemies time to work on their credulity.  The longer you delay the more opposition you will encounter.  Father Ignazio would rather destroy the state than let it be saved by any hand but his.”

Odo reflected.  “Of all my enemies,” he said, “Father Ignazio is the one I most respect, because he is the most sincere.”

“He is the most dangerous, then,” she returned.  “A fanatic is always more powerful than a knave.”

He was struck with her undiminished faith in the sufficiency of such generalisations.  Did she really think that to solve such a problem it was only necessary to define it?  The contact with her unfaltering assurance would once have given him a momentary glow; but now it left him cold.

She was speaking more urgently.  “Surely,” she said, “the noblest use a man can make of his own freedom is to set others free.  My father said it was the only justification of kingship.”

He glanced at her half-sadly.  “Do you still fancy that kings are free?  I am bound hand and foot.”

“So was my father,” she flashed back at him; “but he had the Promethean spirit.”

She coloured at her own quickness, but Odo took the thrust tranquilly.

“Yes,” he said, “your father had the Promethean spirit:  I have not.  The flesh that is daily torn from me does not grow again.”

“Your courage is as great as his,” she exclaimed, her tenderness in arms.

“No,” he answered, “for his was hopeful.”  There was a pause, and then he began to speak of the day’s work.

All the afternoon he had been in consultation with Crescenti, whose vast historical knowledge was of service in determining many disputed points in the tenure of land.  The librarian was in sympathy with any measures tending to relieve the condition of the peasantry; yet he was almost as strongly opposed as Trescorre to any reproduction of the Tuscan constitution.