e, I
carry their rubbish to the pawnbroker's when their sweethearts have bled
them of their savings; I clean the birdcages and feed the monkeys, and
do the steward's accounts when he's drunk, and sleep on a bench in the
portico and steal my food from the pantry...and my father very likely
goes in velvet and carries a sword at his side."

The boy's voice had grown shrill, and his eyes blazed like an owl's in
the dark. Odo would have given the world to be back in his corner, but
he was ashamed to betray his lack of heart; and to give himself courage
he asked haughtily: "And what is your name, boy?"

The hunchback gave him a gleaming look. "Call me Brutus," he cried, "for
Brutus killed a tyrant." He gave Odo's hand a pull. "Come along," said
he, "and I'll show you his statue in the garden--Brutus's statue in a
prince's garden, mind you!" And as the little boy trotted at his side
down the long corridors he kept repeating under his breath in a kind of
angry sing-song, "For Brutus killed a tyrant."

The sense of strangeness inspired by his odd companion soon gave way in
Odo's mind to emotions of delight and wonder. He was, even at that age,
unusually sensitive to external impressions, and when the hunchback,
after descending many stairs and winding through endless back-passages,
at length led him out on a terrace above the gardens, the beauty of the
sight swelled his little heart to bursting.

A Duke of Pianura had, some hundred years earlier, caused a great wing
to be added to his palace by the eminent architect Carlo Borromini, and
this accomplished designer had at the same time replanted and enlarged
the ducal gardens. To Odo, who had never seen plantations more artful
than the vineyards and mulberry orchards about Pontesordo, these
perspectives of clipped beech and yew, these knots of box filled in with
multi-coloured sand, appeared, with the fountains, colonnades and
trellised arbours surmounted by globes of glass, to represent the very
pattern and Paradise of gardens. It seemed indeed too beautiful to be
real, and he trembled, as he sometimes did at the music of the Easter
mass, when the hunchback, laughing at his amazement, led him down the
terrace steps.

It was Odo's lot in after years to walk the alleys of many a splendid
garden, and to pace, often wearily enough, the paths along which he was
now led; but never after did he renew the first enchanted impression of
mystery and brightness that remained with him as