e me, but I promised my dear lady, your mother,
on her death-bed"----

"To be a constant plague to me," said the cavalier, with a vexed smile
and an impatient movement; "but speak on, Paolo,--for when you once get
anything on your mind, one may as well hear it first as last."

"Well, then, my Lord, this girl,--I have made inquiries, and every one
reports her most modest and pious,--the only grandchild of a poor old
woman. Is it worthy of a great lord of an ancient house to bring her to
shame?"

"Who thinks of bringing her to shame? 'Lord of an ancient house'!"
added the cavalier, laughing bitterly,--"a landless beggar, cast out of
everything,--titles, estates, all! Am I, then, fallen so low that my
wooing would disgrace a peasant-girl?"

"My Lord, you cannot mean to woo a peasant-girl in any other way than
one that would disgrace her,--one of the House of Sarelli, that goes
back to the days of the old Roman Empire!"

"And what of the 'House of Sarelli that goes back to the days of the old
Roman Empire'? It is lying like weeds' roots uppermost in the burning
sun. What is left to me but the mountains and my sword? No, I tell
you, Paolo, Agostino Sarelli, cavalier of fortune, is not thinking of
bringing disgrace on a pious and modest maiden, unless it would disgrace
her to be his wife."

"Now may the saints above help us! Why, my Lord, our house in days past
has been allied to royal blood. I could tell you how Joachim VI."--

"Come, come, my good Paolo, spare me one of your chapters of genealogy.
The fact is, my old boy, the world is all topsy-turvy, and the bottom is
the top, and it isn't much matter what comes next. Here are shoals
of noble families uprooted and lying round like those aloes that the
gardener used to throw over the wall in spring-time; and there is that
great boar of a Caesar Borgia turned in to batten and riot over our
pleasant places."

"Oh, my Lord," said the old serving-man, with a distressful movement,
"we have fallen on evil times, to be sure, and they say his Holiness has
excommunicated us. Anselmo heard that in Naples yesterday."

"Excommunicated!" said the young man,--every feature of his fine face,
and every nerve of his graceful form seeming to quiver with the effort
to express supreme contempt. "Excommunicated! I should _hope_ so! One
would hope through Our Lady's grace to act so that Alexander, and his
adulterous, incestuous, filthy, false-swearing, perjured, murderous
crew, _would