and drew her closer to
me, gently and protectingly.

She suffered it very stonily, like a poor fascinated thing that is
robbed by fear of its power to resist the evil that it feels enfolding
it.

"O Madonnino!" she whispered fearfully, and sighed. "Nay, you must not.
It... it is not good."

"Not good?" quoth I, and it was just so that that fool of a son of
Balducci's must have protested in the story when he was told by his
father that it was not good to look on women. "Nay, now, but it is good
to me."

"And they say you are to be a priest," she added, which seemed to me a
very foolish and inconsequent thing to add.

"Well, then? And what of that?" I asked.

She looked at me again with those timid eyes of hers. "You should be at
your studies," said she.

"I am," said I, and smiled. "I am studying a new subject."

"Madonnino, it is not a subject whose study makes good priests," she
announced, and puzzled me again by the foolish inconsequence of her
words.

Already, indeed, she began to disappoint me. Saving my mother--whom I
did not presume to judge at all, and who seemed a being altogether
apart from what little humanity I had known until then--I had found
that foolishness was as natural to women as its bleat to a sheep or its
cackle to a goose; and in this opinion I had been warmly confirmed by
Fra Gervasio. Now here in Luisina I had imagined at first that I had
discovered a phase of womanhood unsuspected and exceptional. She was
driving me to conclude, however, that I had been mistaken, and that
here was just a pretty husk containing a very trivial spirit, whose
companionship must prove a dull affair when custom should have staled
the first impression of her fresh young beauty.

It is plain now that I did her an injustice, for there was about her
words none of the inconsequence I imagined. The fault was in myself and
in the profound ignorance of the ways of men and women which went hand
in hand with my deep but ineffectual learning in the ways of saints.

Our entertainment, however, was not destined to go further. For at the
moment in which I puzzled over her words and sought to attach to them
some intelligent meaning, there broke from behind us a scream that flung
us apart, as startled as if we had been conscious indeed of guilt.

We looked round to find that it had been uttered by my mother. Not ten
yards away she stood, a tall black figure against the grey background
of the lichened wall, with Giojos