s soul is as red as hell; sin scarlet through and through;
warp and woof, there is no white thread of heaven in him. Shall I number
you the beads in his chaplet of vices? The seven deadly devils wanton in
his heart; his spirit is of an incredible lewdness; he is prouder than
the Pope, more cruel than a mousing cat--all which I complacently
forgave him till he touched at my top-knot, but now I hate him."

Again the girl crossed herself swiftly, while she looked at the puckered
face with curiosity, with pity.

"Can you hate in God's sunshine?" she asked, and as she spoke she looked
about her at the trees and the mountains and the sea and the grass and
the flowers, ennobled and ennobling in the sunlight, and her heart ached
at the new thoughts that had thrust themselves into her life. But the
fool sneered at her surprise and did not heed her pity.

"My hate is a cold snake, and the sun will not thaw me." He struck
himself fiercely on the breast and stared at her. "Look at me, humped
and hideous. How could this rugged hull prove an argosy of
ineffabilities?"

The pity deepened on the girl's face, scattering the curiosity, and she
spoke gently, hopefully:

"I have sometimes picked a wrinkled, twisted pear and found it
honey-sweet at the heart."

Even the callous fool felt the tenderness in Perpetua's voice, the
tender pity of the strong spirit for the weak, the evil, the unhappy. He
shook his head less angrily than before.

"I am no such bird-of-paradise," he sighed. "My mind is a crooked knife
in a crooked sheath. When I was a child in my Italian village, trimly
built, children laughed at me for my ugliness, for my hump, for my
peaked chin and my limp, and I learned to curse other children as I
learned to speak. Every hand, every tongue was against the hunchback,
yet my shame saved me. For my gibbosities tickled the taste of a
travelling mountebank. He bought me of my parents, who were willing
enough to part with their monster; he trained me to his trade, taught me
to sing foul songs and to dance foul dances. I have grinned and whistled
through evil days and ways. My wit was gray with iniquities when
Hildebrand, the King's minion, saw me one day at a fair in Naples and
picked me out for jester to Prince Robert."

The head of Diogenes drooped upon his breast. He had not talked, he had
not thought, of the past for long enough, and the memory vexed him.
Perpetua propped the sword against the wall of her dwelling and s