arth. The failure of bodily activity seemed to
have doubled his moral vigour, and the walls shook with the vehemence of
his commands. The Marchioness was sunk in a state of placid apathy from
which only her husband's outbursts roused her; one of the canonesses was
dead, and the other, drier and more shrivelled than ever, pined in her
corner like a statue whose mate is broken. Bruno was dead too; his old
dog's bones had long since enriched a corner of the vineyard; and some
of the younger lads that Odo had known about the place were grown to
sober-faced men with wives and children.

Don Gervaso was still chaplain of Donnaz; and Odo saw with surprise that
the grave ecclesiastic who had formerly seemed an old man to him was in
fact scarce past the middle age. In general aspect he was unchanged; but
his countenance had darkened, and what Odo had once taken for harshness
of manner he now perceived to be a natural melancholy. The young man had
not been long at Donnaz without discovering that in that little world of
crystallised traditions the chaplain was the only person conscious of
the new forces abroad. It had never occurred to the Marquess that
anything short of a cataclysm such as it would be blasphemy to predict
could change the divinely established order whereby the territorial lord
took tithes from his peasantry and pastured his game on their crops. The
hierarchy which rested on the bowed back of the toiling serf and
culminated in the figure of the heaven-sent King seemed to him as
immutable as the everlasting hills. The men of his generation had not
learned that it was built on a human foundation and that a sudden
movement of the underlying mass might shake the structure to its
pinnacle. The Marquess, who, like Donna Laura, already beheld Odo on the
throne of Pianura, was prodigal of counsels which showed a touching
inability to discern the new aspect under which old difficulties were
likely to present themselves. That a ruler should be brave, prudent,
personally abstemious, and nobly lavish in his official display; that he
should repress any attempts on the privileges of the Church, while at
the same time protecting his authority from the encroachments of the
Holy See; these axioms seemed to the old man to sum up the sovereign's
duty to the state. The relation, to his mind, remained a distinctly
personal and paternal one; and Odo's attempts to put before him the new
theory of government, as a service performed by the