Corbario did not launch into wild extravagance
after all, but behaved himself with the faultless dulness of a model
middle-aged husband. His wife loved him and was perfectly happy, and
happiness finally stole her superfluous years away, and they evaporated
in the sunshine, and she forgot all about them. Marcello Consalvi, who
had lost his father when he was a mere child, found a friend in his
mother's husband, and became very fond of him, and thought him a good
man to imitate; and in return Corbario made a companion of the
fair-haired boy, and taught him to ride and shoot in his holidays, and
all went well.

Moreover, Marcello's mother, who was a good woman, told him that the
world was very wicked; and with the blind desire for her son's lasting
innocence, which is the most touching instinct of loving motherhood, she
entreated him to lead a spotless life. When Marcello, in the excusable
curiosity of budding youth, asked his stepfather what that awful
wickedness was against which he was so often warned, Corbario told him
true stories of men who had betrayed their country and their friends,
and of all sorts of treachery and meanness, to which misdeeds the boy
did not feel himself at all inclined; so that he wondered why his mother
seemed so very anxious lest he should go astray. Then he repeated to her
what Corbario had told him, and she smiled sweetly and said nothing, and
trusted her husband all the more. She felt that he understood her, and
was doing his best to help her in making Marcello what she wished him to
be.

The boy was brought up at home; in Rome in the winter, and in summer on
the great estate in the south, which his father had bought and which was
to be a part of his inheritance.

He was taught by masters who came to the house to give their lessons and
went away as soon as the task was over. He had no tutor, for his mother
had not found a layman whom she could trust in that capacity, and yet
she understood that it was not good for a boy to be followed everywhere
by a priest. Besides, Corbario gave so much of his time to his stepson
that a tutor was hardly needed; he walked with him and rode with him, or
spent hours with him at home when the weather was bad. There had never
been a cross word between the two since they had met. It was an ideal
existence. Even the gossips stopped talking at last, and there was not
one, not even the most ingeniously evil-tongued of all, that prophesied
evil.

They raised t