ances of his new confessor he felt the distinction to be one
rather of taste than of principle; and it seemed to him that the
religion of the aristocracy might not unfairly be summed up in the
ex-soprano's cynical aphorism: "As respectful children of our Heavenly
Father it behoves us not to speak till we are spoken to."

Even the religious ceremonies he witnessed did not console him for that
chill hour of dawn, when, in the chapel at Donnaz, he had served the
mass for Don Gervaso, with a heart trembling at its own unworthiness yet
uplifted by the sense of the Divine Presence. In the churches adorned
like aristocratic drawing-rooms, of which some Madonna, wreathed in
artificial flowers, seemed the amiable and indulgent hostess, and where
the florid passionate music of the mass was rendered by the King's opera
singers before a throng of chattering cavaliers and ladies, Odo prayed
in vain for a reawakening of the old emotion. The sense of sonship was
gone. He felt himself an alien in the temple of this affable divinity,
and his heart echoed no more than the cry which had once lifted him on
wings of praise to the very threshold of the hidden glory--

Domine, dilexi decorem domus tuae et locum habitationis gloriae tuae!

It was in the first reaction from this dimly felt loss that he lit one
day on a volume which Alfieri had smuggled into the Academy--the Lettres
Philosophiques of Francois Arouet de Voltaire.

BOOK II.

THE NEW LIGHT.

Zu neuen Ufern lockt ein neuer Tag.

2.1.

One afternoon of April in the year 1774, Odo Valsecca, riding down the
hillside below the church of the Superga, had reined in his horse at a
point where a group of Spanish chestnuts overhung the way. The air was
light and pure, the shady turf invited him, and dismounting he bid his
servant lead the horses to the wayside inn half way down the slope.

The spot he had chosen, though secluded as some nook above the gorge of
Donnaz, commanded a view of the Po rolling at his feet like a flood of
yellowish metal, and beyond, outspread in clear spring sunshine, the
great city in the bosom of the plain. The spectacle was fair enough to
touch any fancy: brown domes and facades set in new-leaved gardens and
surrounded by vineyards extending to the nearest acclivities;
country-houses glancing through the fresh green of planes and willows;
monastery-walls cresting the higher ridges; and westward the Po winding
in sunlit curves toward the Alps.

O