's surprise,
said with a smile: "No one does more good in Pianura than our learned
librarian."

A different and still more striking welcome awaited the Duchess, who
presently appeared on her favourite white hackney, surrounded by the
members of her household. Her reluctance to take part in the pilgrimage
had been overcome by the exhilaration of showing herself to the public,
and as she rode along in her gold-embroidered habit and plumed hat she
was just such an image of radiant and indulgent sovereignty as turns
enforced submission into a romantic allegiance. Her flushing cheek and
kindled eye showed the reaction of the effect she produced, and if her
subjects forgot her debts, her violences and follies, she was perhaps
momentarily transformed into the being their enthusiasm created. She was
at any rate keenly alive to the admiration she excited and eager to
enhance it by those showy impulses of benevolence that catch the public
eye; as when, at the city gates, she stopped her horse to intervene in
behalf of a soldier who had been put under arrest for some slight
infraction of duty, and then rode on enveloped in the passionate
shouting of the crowd.

The shrine at which the young prince was to pay his devotions stood just
beyond the city, on the summit of one of the low knolls which pass for
hills in the level landscape of Pianura. The white-columned church with
its classical dome and portico had been erected as a thank-offering
after the plague of 1630, and the nave was lined with life-sized votive
figures of Dukes and Duchesses clad in the actual wigs and robes that
had dressed their transient grandeur. As the procession wound into the
church, to the ringing of bells and the chanting of the choir, Odo was
struck by the spectacle of that line of witnesses, watching in
glassy-eyed irony the pomp and display to which their moldering robes
and tarnished insignia seemed to fix so brief a term. Once or twice
already he had felt the shows of human power as no more than vanishing
reflections on the tide of being; and now, as he knelt near the shrine,
with its central glitter of jewels and its nimbus of wavering lights,
and listened to the reiterated ancient wail:

"Mater inviolata, ora pro nobis!
Virgo veneranda, ora pro nobis!
Speculum justitiae, ora pro nobis!"

it seemed to him as though the bounds of life and death were merged, and
the sumptuous group of which he formed a part already dusted over with
ob