and the streets disturbed only by the watchman's cry
or by a flash of light and noise as a sedan chair passed with its escort
of linkmen and servants. All this was amazing enough to the sleepy eyes
of the little boy so unexpectedly translated from the solitude of
Pontesordo; but when the carriage turned under another arch and drew up
before the doorway of a great building ablaze with lights, the pressure
of accumulated emotions made him fling his arms about his preceptor's
neck.

"Courage, cavaliere, courage! You have duties, you have
responsibilities," the abate admonished him; and Odo, choking back his
fright, suffered himself to be lifted out by one of the lacqueys grouped
about the door. The abate, who carried a much lower crest than at
Pontesordo, and seemed far more anxious to please the servants than they
to oblige him, led the way up a shining marble staircase where beggars
whined on the landings and powdered footmen in the ducal livery were
running to and fro with trays of refreshments. Odo, who knew that his
mother lived in the Duke's palace, had vaguely imagined that his
father's death must have plunged its huge precincts into silence and
mourning; but as he followed the abate up successive flights of stairs
and down long corridors full of shadow he heard a sound of dance music
below and caught the flash of girandoles through the antechamber doors.
The thought that his father's death had made no difference to any one in
the palace was to the child so much more astonishing than any of the
other impressions crowding his brain, that these were scarcely felt, and
he passed as in a dream through rooms where servants were quarrelling
over cards and waiting-women rummaged in wardrobes full of perfumed
finery, to a bedchamber in which a lady dressed in weeds sat
disconsolately at supper.

"Mamma! Mamma!" he cried, springing forward in a passion of tears.

The lady, who was young, pale and handsome, pushed back her chair with a
warning hand.

"Child," she exclaimed, "your shoes are covered with mud; and, good
heavens, how you smell of the stable! Abate, is it thus you teach your
pupil to approach me?"

"Madam, I am abashed by the cavaliere's temerity. But in truth I believe
excessive grief has clouded his wits--'tis inconceivable how he mourns
his father!"

Donna Laura's eyebrows rose in a faint smile. "May he never have worse
to grieve for!" said she in French; then, extending her scented hand to
the little