an of churchly aims, as were mine, being in
perversive dalliance with that peasant-wench, repaired straight to
my mother with the story of it, which I doubt not lost nothing by its
repetition.

Meanwhile I abode there with Luisina. I was in no haste to let her go.
Her presence pleased me in some subtle, quite indefinable manner; and my
sense of beauty, which, always strong, had hitherto lain dormant within
me, was awake at last and was finding nourishment in the graces of her.

I sat down upon the topmost of the terrace steps, and made her sit
beside me. This she did after some demur about the honour of it and her
own unworthiness, objections which I brushed peremptorily aside.

So we sat there on that May morning, quite close together, for which
there was, after all, no need, seeing that the steps were of a noble
width. At our feet spread the garden away down the flight of terraces
to end in the castle's grey, buttressed wall. But from where we sat we
could look beyond this, our glance meeting the landscape a mile or so
away with the waters of the Taro glittering in the sunshine, and the
Apennines, all hazy, for an ultimate background.

I took her hand, which she relinquished to me quite freely and frankly
with an innocence as great as my own; and I asked her who she was and
how she came to Mondolfo. It was then that I learnt that her name was
Luisina, that she was the daughter of one of the women employed in the
castle kitchen, who had brought her to help there a week ago from Borgo
Taro, where she had been living with an aunt.

To-day the notion of the Tyrant of Mondolfo sitting--almost coram
populo--on the steps of the garden of his castle, clasping the hand of
the daughter of one of his scullions, is grotesque and humiliating. At
the time the thought never presented itself to me at all, and had it
done so it would have troubled me no whit. She was my first glimpse
of fresh young maidenhood, and I was filled with pleasant interest and
desirous of more acquaintance with this phenomenon. Beyond that I did
not go.

I told her frankly that she was very beautiful. Whereupon she looked at
me with suddenly startled eyes that were full of fearful questionings,
and made to draw her hand from mine. Unable to understand her fears, and
seeking to reassure her, to convince her that in me she had a friend,
one who would ever protect her from the brutalities of all the Rinolfos
in the world, I put an arm about her shoulders