Gamba replied by an impatient gesture.  “As to the Virgin’s crown,” he said, “your Highness must have guessed it was one of the friars’ tricks:  a last expedient to turn the people against you.  I was not bred up by a priest for nothing; I know what past masters those gentry are in raising ghosts and reading portents.  They know the minds of the poor folk as the herdsman knows the habits of his cattle; and for generations they have used that knowledge to bring the people more completely under their control.”

“And what have we to oppose to such a power?” Odo exclaimed.  “We are fighting the battle of ideas against passions, of reflection against instinct; and you have but to look in the human heart to guess which side will win in such a struggle.  We have science and truth and common-sense with us, you say—­yes, but the Church has love and fear and tradition, and the solidarity of nigh two thousand years of dominion.”

Gamba listened in respectful silence; then he replied with a faint smile:  “All that your Highness says is true; but I beg leave to relate to your Highness a tale which I read lately in an old book of your library.  According to this story it appears that when the early Christians of Alexandria set out to destroy the pagan idols in the temples they were seized with great dread at sight of the god Serapis; for even those that did not believe in the old gods feared them, and none dared raise a hand against the sacred image.  But suddenly a soldier who was bolder than the rest flung his battle-axe at the figure—­and when it broke in pieces, there rushed out nothing worse than a great company of rats."...

***

The Duke had promised to visit Fulvia that evening.  For several days his state of indecision had made him find pretexts for avoiding her; but now that the charter was signed and he had ordered its proclamation, he craved the contact of her unwavering faith.

He found her alone in the dusk of the convent parlour; but he had hardly crossed the threshold before he was aware of an indefinable change in his surroundings.  She advanced with an impulsiveness out of harmony with the usual tranquillity of their meetings, and he felt her hand tremble and burn in his.  In the twilight it seemed to him that her very dress had a warmer rustle and glimmer, that there emanated from her glance and movements some heady fragrance of a long-past summer.  He smiled to think that this phantom coquetry should have risen at the summons of an academic degree; but some deeper sense in him was stirred as by a vision of waste riches adrift on the dim seas of chance.

For a moment she sat silent, as in the days when they had been too near each other for many words; and there was something indescribably soothing in this dreamlike return to the past.  It was he who roused himself first.

“How young you look!” he said, giving involuntary utterance to his thought.

“Do I?” she answered gaily.  “I am glad of that, for I feel extraordinarily young tonight.  Perhaps it is because I have been thinking a great deal of the old days—­of Venice and Turin—­and of the high-road to Vercelli, for instance.”  She glanced at him with a smile.