“And what of the ’House of Sarelli that goes back to the days of the old Roman Empire’?  It is lying like weeds’ roots uppermost in the burning sun.  What is left to me but the mountains and my sword?  No, I tell you, Paolo, Agostino Sarelli, cavalier of fortune, is not thinking of bringing disgrace on a pious and modest maiden, unless it would disgrace her to be his wife.”

“Now may the saints above help us!  Why, my Lord, our house in days past has been allied to royal blood.  I could tell you how Joachim VI.”—­

“Come, come, my good Paolo, spare me one of your chapters of genealogy.  The fact is, my old boy, the world is all topsy-turvy, and the bottom is the top, and it isn’t much matter what comes next.  Here are shoals of noble families uprooted and lying round like those aloes that the gardener used to throw over the wall in spring-time; and there is that great boar of a Caesar Borgia turned in to batten and riot over our pleasant places.”

“Oh, my Lord,” said the old serving-man, with a distressful movement, “we have fallen on evil times, to be sure, and they say his Holiness has excommunicated us.  Anselmo heard that in Naples yesterday.”

“Excommunicated!” said the young man,—­every feature of his fine face, and every nerve of his graceful form seeming to quiver with the effort to express supreme contempt.  “Excommunicated!  I should hope so!  One would hope through Our Lady’s grace to act so that Alexander, and his adulterous, incestuous, filthy, false-swearing, perjured, murderous crew, would excommunicate us!  In these times, one’s only hope of paradise lies in being excommunicated.”

“Oh, my dear master,” said the old man, falling on his knees, “what is to become of us?  That I should live to hear you talk like an infidel and unbeliever!”

“Why, hear you, poor old fool!  Did you never hear in Dante of the Popes that are burning in hell?  Wasn’t Dante a Christian, I beg to know?”

“Oh, my Lord, my Lord! a religion got out of poetry, books, and romances won’t do to die by.  We have no business with the affairs of the Head of the Church,—­it’s the Lord’s appointment.  We have only to shut our eyes and obey.  It may all do well enough to talk so when you are young and fresh; but when sickness and death come, then we must have religion,—­ and if we have gone out of the only true Roman Catholic Apostolic Church, what becomes of our souls?  Ah, I misdoubted about your taking so much to poetry, though my poor mistress was so proud of it; but these poets are all heretics, my Lord,—­that’s my firm belief.  But, my Lord, if you do go to hell, I’m going there with you; I’m sure I never could show my face among the saints, and you not there.”

“Well, come, then, my poor Paolo,” said the cavalier, stretching out his hand to his serving-man, “don’t take it to heart so.  Many a better man than I has been excommunicated and cursed from toe to crown, and been never a whit the worse for it.  There’s Jerome Savonarola there in Florence—­a most holy man, they say, who has had revelations straight from heaven—­has been excommunicated; but he preaches and gives the sacraments all the same, and nobody minds it.”