friends, you know, what's the use? It's lucky we have you here now; we
want one of your family to send on a mission to Florence, and talk a
little reason into the citizens and the Signoria. Come right away with
me to the Pope."

"Brother, in God's name let me go! I have no mission to the great of
this world; and I cannot remember or be called by the name of other
days, or salute kinsman or acquaintance after the flesh, without a
breach of vows."

"Poh, poh! you are nervous, dyspeptic; you don't understand things.
Don't you see you are where vows can be bound and loosed? Come along,
and let us wake you out of this nightmare. Such a pother about a pretty
peasant-girl! One of your rank and taste, too! I warrant me the little
sinner practised on you at the confessional. I know their ways, the
whole of them; but you mourn over it in a way that is perfectly
incomprehensible. If you had tripped a little,--paid a compliment, or
taken a liberty or two,--it would have been only natural; but this
desperation, when you have resisted like Saint Anthony himself, shows
your nerves are out of order and you need change."

"For God's sake, brother, tempt me not!" said Father Francesco,
wrenching himself away, with such a haggard and insane vehemence as
quite to discompose the churchman; and drawing his cowl over his face,
he glided swiftly down a side-aisle and out the door.

The churchman was too easy-going to risk the fatigue of a scuffle with a
man whom he considered as a monomaniac; but he stepped smoothly and
stealthily after him and watched him go out.

"Look you," he said to a servant in violet livery who was waiting by the
door, "follow yonder Capuchin and bring me word where he abides.--He may
be cracked," he said to himself; "but, after all, one of his blood may
be worth mending, and do us good service either in Florence or Milan. We
must have him transferred to some convent here, where we can lay hands
on him readily, if we want him."

Meanwhile Father Francesco wends his way through many a dark and dingy
street to an ancient Capuchin convent, where he finds brotherly
admission. Weary and despairing is he beyond all earthly despair, for
the very altar of his God seems to have failed him. He asked for bread,
and has got a stone,--he asked a fish, and has got a scorpion. Again and
again the worldly, almost scoffing, tone of the superior to whom he has
been confessing sounds like the hiss of a serpent in his ear.

But he