bly great. I must consult our good prior."

The good Anselm kissed his brow, and left him, to consult the superior
as to his penance.

And lo! Gerard could pray now.

And he prayed with all his heart.

The phase, through which this remarkable mind now passed, may be summed
in a word--Penitence.

He turned with terror and aversion from the world, and begged
passionately to remain in the convent. To him, convent nurtured, it was
like a bird returning wounded, wearied, to its gentle nest.

He passed his novitiate in prayer, and mortification, and pious reading
and meditation.

The Princess Claelia's spy went home and told her that Gerard was
certainly dead, the manner of his death unknown at present.

She seemed literally stunned. When, after a long time, she found breath
to speak at all, it was to bemoan her lot, cursed with such ready tools.
"So soon," she sighed; "see how swift these monsters are to do ill
deeds. They come to us in our hot blood, and first tempt us with their
venal daggers, then enact the mortal deeds we ne'er had thought on but
for them."

Ere many hours had passed, her pity for Gerard and hatred of his
murderer had risen to fever heat; which with this fool was blood heat.

"Poor soul! I cannot call thee back to life. But he shall never live
that traitorously slew thee."

And she put armed men in ambush, and kept them on guard all day, ready,
when Lodovico should come for his money, to fall on him in a certain
antechamber and hack him to pieces.

"Strike at his head," said she, "for he weareth a privy coat of mail;
and if he goes hence alive your own heads shall answer it."

And so she sat weeping her victim, and pulling the strings of machines
to shed the blood of a second for having been her machine to kill the
first.

CHAPTER LXX

One of the novice Gerard's self-imposed penances was to receive Lodovico
kindly, feeling secretly as to a slimy serpent.

Never was self-denial better bestowed; and like most rational penances,
it soon became no penance at all. At first the pride and complacency,
with which the assassin gazed on the one life he had saved, was perhaps
as ludicrous as pathetic; but it is a great thing to open a good door in
a heart. One good thing follows another through the aperture. Finding it
so sweet to save life, the miscreant went on to be averse to taking
it; and from that to remorse; and from remorse to something very like
penitence. And here Teresa coopera