“Sometimes thou seemest so like a rebel I know not why I come to thee in trouble”—­Fra Francesco looked at him with grieving eyes—­“except that in thine heart thou art indeed true.”

“So help me God—­it is my prayer!” Fra Paolo answered.  “And for thee and me alike, however we may differ, there is this other helpful word in that same blessed book which they will not let the starving people share—­’God is faithful who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able, but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.’  May God be with thee!”

“And Christ and the Holy Mother have thee in their keeping!” Fra Francesco answered, with a yearning look in his loving face, in a tone that lingered on the sweet word “mother” and almost seemed to hint of an omission, as they clasped hands and parted.

This was the last time they had had speech together; but on the evening of the day when Venice had declared her loyalty to her Prince by unanimous vote, there was much animated talk of the matter in the refectory.  Fra Francesco had joined the group and listened silently.  But as the call to compline rang through the cloisters and the friars scattered, he had turned his face to Fra Paolo, who read thereon a very passion of love, reproach, and pain which he could not forget.  “When the duties of the Council press me less,” he thought, “I will seek him out and reason with him.”

But after that night the gentle friar was seen no more in Venice, and inquiry failed to develop a reason for his flight.  They missed him in the Servi, where already they were beginning to gather up the pale happenings of his convent life with the kindly recollection which tinged them with a thread of romance, as his brothers of the order rehearsed them in the cloistered ways where he would come no more; for to him some ministry of beauty had always been assigned.  The vines drooped for his tending, they said; and the pet stork who wandered in the close languished for his hand to feed the dainty morsel, and for his voice in that indulgent teasing which had provoked its proudest preening.

But this, perhaps, was only fancy, or their way of recognizing a certain grace they missed.  But of the reason of his going, which most of them connected in some way with this movement in Venice over which he had often grieved, there was no open recognition among them—­partly because they feared that ubiquitous ear of the Senate, which penetrated unseen through many closed doorways, partly because they realized how strange it was that their own sympathies had not confessed his view of right.

Furtively, too, the friars watched Fra Paolo; for the adoration of the gentle Fra Francesco for this idol of their order, from the day when they had entered the convent as boys together, had formed a cloister idyl—­none the less that the response of the graver friar was not equally demonstrative, though it was felt to be true; for it was a marvel that two such opposite natures should hold so closely together and that Fra Francesco, for all his gentleness, should apparently retain opinions uninfluenced by the power and learning which all others recognized.