Her departure left no traces but were speedily repaired by the coming of spring.  The sun growing warmer, and the close season putting an end to the Marquess’s hunting, it was now Odo’s chief pleasure to carry his books to the walled garden between the castle and the southern face of the cliff.  This small enclosure, probably a survival of medieval horticulture, had along the upper ledge of its wall a grass walk commanding the flow of the stream, and an angle turret that turned one slit to the valley, the other to the garden lying below like a tranquil well of scent and brightness:  its box trees clipped to the shape of peacocks and lions, its clove pinks and simples set in a border of thrift, and a pear tree basking on its sunny wall.  These pleasant spaces, which Odo had to himself save when the canonesses walked there to recite their rosary, he peopled with the knights and ladies of the novelle, and the fantastic beings of Pulci’s epic:  there walked the Fay Morgana, Regulus the loyal knight, the giant Morgante, Trajan the just Emperor and the proud figure of King Conrad; so that, escaping thither from the after-dinner dullness of the tapestry parlour, the boy seemed to pass from the most oppressive solitude to a world of warmth and fellowship.

1.6.

Odo, who, like all neglected children, was quick to note in the demeanour of his elders any hint of a change in his own condition, had been keenly conscious of the effect produced at Donnaz by the news of the Duchess of Pianura’s deliverance.  Guided perhaps by his mother’s exclamation, he noticed an added zeal in Don Gervaso’s teachings and an unction in the manner of his aunts and grandmother, who embraced him as though they were handling a relic; while the old Marquess, though he took his grandson seldomer on his rides, would sit staring at him with a frowning tenderness that once found vent in the growl—­“Morbleu, but he’s too good for the tonsure!” All this made it clear to Odo that he was indeed meant for the Church, and he learned without surprise that the following spring he was to be sent to the seminary at Asti.

With a view to prepare him for this change, the canonesses suggested his attending them that year on their annual pilgrimage to the sanctuary of Oropa.  Thither, for every feast of the Assumption, these pious ladies travelled in their litter; and Odo had heard from them many tales of the miraculous Black Virgin who drew thousands to her shrine among the mountains.  They set forth in August, two days before the feast, ascending through chestnut groves to the region of bare rocks; thence downward across torrents hung with white acacia and along park-like grassy levels deep in shade.  The lively air, the murmur of verdure, the perfume of mown grass in the meadows and the sweet call of the cuckoos from every thicket made an enchantment of the way; but Odo’s pleasure redoubled when, gaining the high-road to Oropa, they mingled with the long train of devotees ascending from the plain.