ly deprecating the vehemence of both
writers and begging his unknown defender to set an example of tolerance
by closing a useless and unseemly war of words. On the following day the
Churchman contained a notice that, at Monsignor Montanelli's publicly
expressed desire, "A Son of the Church" would withdraw from the
controversy.

The last word remained with the Gadfly. He issued a little leaflet,
in which he declared himself disarmed and converted by Montanelli's
Christian meekness and ready to weep tears of reconciliation upon the
neck of the first Sanfedist he met. "I am even willing," he concluded;
"to embrace my anonymous challenger himself; and if my readers knew, as
his Eminence and I know, what that implies and why he remains anonymous,
they would believe in the sincerity of my conversion."

In the latter part of November he announced to the literary committee
that he was going for a fortnight's holiday to the seaside. He went,
apparently, to Leghorn; but Dr. Riccardo, going there soon after and
wishing to speak to him, searched the town for him in vain. On the 5th
of December a political demonstration of the most extreme character
burst out in the States of the Church, along the whole chain of the
Apennines; and people began to guess the reason of the Gadfly's sudden
fancy to take his holidays in the depth of winter. He came back to
Florence when the riots had been quelled, and, meeting Riccardo in the
street, remarked affably:

"I hear you were inquiring for me in Leghorn; I was staying in Pisa.
What a pretty old town it is! There's something quite Arcadian about
it."

In Christmas week he attended an afternoon meeting of the literary
committee which was held in Dr. Riccardo's lodgings near the Porta alla
Croce. The meeting was a full one, and when he came in, a little late,
with an apologetic bow and smile, there seemed to be no seat empty.
Riccardo rose to fetch a chair from the next room, but the Gadfly
stopped him. "Don't trouble about it," he said; "I shall be quite
comfortable here"; and crossing the room to a window beside which
Gemma had placed her chair, he sat down on the sill, leaning his head
indolently back against the shutter.

As he looked down at Gemma, smiling with half-shut eyes, in the subtle,
sphinx-like way that gave him the look of a Leonardo da Vinci portrait,
the instinctive distrust with which he inspired her deepened into a
sense of unreasoning fear.

The proposal under discussio