. You were a votive offering, Agostino;
you were vowed to the service of God that your father's life might be
spared, years ago, ere you were born. From the very edge of death was
your father brought back to life and strength. He would have used that
life and that strength to cheat God of the price of His boon to me."

"And if," Fra Gervasio questioned almost fiercely, "Agostino in the end
should have no vocation, should have no call to such a life?"

She looked at him very wistfully, almost pityingly. "How should that
be?" she asked. "He was offered to God. And that God accepted the gift,
He showed when He gave Giovanni back to life. How, then, could it come
to pass that Agostino should have no call? Would God reject that which
He had accepted?"

Fra Gervasio rose again. "You go too deep for me, Madonna," he said
bitterly. "It is not for me to speak of my gifts save reverently and in
profound and humble gratitude for that grace by which God bestowed them
upon me. But I am accounted something of a casuist. I am a doctor of
theology and of canon law, and but for the weak state of my health I
should be sitting to-day in the chair of canon law at the University of
Pavia. And yet, Madonna, the things you tell me with such assurance make
a mock of everything I have ever learnt."

Even I, lad as I was, perceived the bitter irony in which he spoke. Not
so she. I vow she flushed under what she accounted his praise of her
wisdom and divine revelation; for vanity is the last human weakness to
be discarded. Then she seemed to recollect herself. She bowed her head
very reverently.

"It is God's grace that reveals to me the truth," she said.

He fell back a step in his amazement at having been so thoroughly
misunderstood. Then he drew away from the table. He looked at her as
he would speak, but checked on the thought. He turned, and so, without
another word, departed, and left us sitting there together.

It was then that we had our talk; or, rather, that she talked, whilst I
sat listening. And presently as I listened, I came gradually once more
under the spell of which I had more than once that day been on the point
of casting off the yoke.

For, after all, you are to discern in what I have written here, between
what were my feelings at the time and what are my criticisms of to-day
in the light of the riper knowledge to which I have come. The handling
of a sword had thrilled me strangely, as I have shown. Yet was I ready
to