Then the youthful scholar had turned his eyes upon him silently; and it had seemed to the old man, in his great love, that a sudden glory had transfigured the grave young face like a consecration.  He still remembered the tones of that clear voice saying serenely:  “My Father, when God speaketh a message in our souls, the peace and beauty which come to us as we follow its call, are in the measure which He hath decreed for us.”

Now that the convent rang with his triumphs, and Fra Paolo was often absent from his cell on missions of honor, the old friar sometimes wondered how many of those philosophic and scientific truths which had made him famous as an original thinker had come to the lad in glimmerings on that first night among the hills, when, turning to his old friend and stretching out his hands with a solemn, imploring motion which seemed to confess a desperate need of isolation, he had said only, “Let me think!”

Had his seeming nearness to the stars in the convent loggia brought him a premonition of the later message which had made him the “friend and master” of Galileo?

Did he develop his “Laws of Sound” in that voiceful silence; or was it in that solitude he had first watched the gentle ebb and flow of his own life-current and learned the secret which Harvey, later, uttered to the world?

Or had he been wholly absorbed in those philosophical questions which he so brilliantly disputed at the learned Court of Mantua?

But to be near him was only to wonder more at the mystery which enveloped him; and Fra Giulio, now that the lad had reached his prime, often went reverently back to that night under the stars, when the gifted youth had first stood, distanced as it were from men, remote from human habitations and alone with the One whom only he acknowledged as Master—­then, perhaps, he had first been conscious of his latent power; surely then the manifold message of his life must have whispered within him many premonitions!

The time was long past when a question could arise as to the right of the Augustinians to rich possessions in church and convent; and the priceless treasures of art, flung sometimes in atonement upon their quiet walls by a world-worn artist, or sent in propitiation for some unconfessed sin by a prince of Church or State, were found side by side with the gifts and legacies of the faithful, which, in sincere devotion, they often impoverished their families to bestow.

But none of these things had charms for Fra Paolo.  Not even the beauty of the cloisters, where the low, gray arches rested on slender shafts of marble, wrought and twisted into as many devices, drew his thoughts from the ceaseless contemplation of his problems; not even the petted rose-tree, lovingly trained by the gentle Fra Francesco and lifting its pink glory to the crest of the colonnade, won his eyes to wander from the absorbing treasures of the great library where he passed his days.  Here many a brother