“Ah, dear uncle, I am not so very happy,” said Agnes, the tears starting into her eyes.

“Not happy?” said the monk, looking up from his drawing.  “Pray, what’s the matter now?  Has a bee stung your finger? or have you lost your nosegay over a rock? or what dreadful affliction has come upon you?—­hey, my little heart?”

Agnes sat down on the corner of the marble fountain, and, covering her face with her apron, sobbed as if her heart would break.

“What has that old priest been saying to her in the confession?” said Father Antonio to himself.  “I dare say he cannot understand her.  She is as pure as a dew-drop on a cobweb, and as delicate; and these priests, half of them don’t know how to handle the Lord’s lambs.—­Come now, little Agnes,” he said, with a coaxing tone, “what is its trouble?—­tell its old uncle,—­there’s a dear!”

“Ah, uncle, I can’t!” said Agnes, between her sobs.

“Can’t tell its uncle!—­there’s a pretty go!  Perhaps you will tell grandmamma?”

“Oh, no, no, no! not for the world!” said Agnes, sobbing still more bitterly.

“Why, really, little heart of mine, this is getting serious,” said the monk; “let your old uncle try to help you.”

“It isn’t for myself,” said Agnes, endeavoring to check her feelings,—­“it is not for myself,—­it is for another,—­for a soul lost.  Ah, my Jesus, have mercy!”

“A soul lost?  Our Mother forbid!” said the monk, crossing himself.  “Lost in this Christian land, so overflowing with the beauty of the Lord?—­lost out of this fair sheepfold of Paradise?”

“Yes, lost,” said Agnes, despairingly,—­“and if somebody do not save him, lost forever; and it is a brave and noble soul, too,—­like one of the angels that fell.”

“Who is it, dear?—­tell me about it,” said the monk.  “I am one of the shepherds whose place it is to go after that which is lost, even till I find it.”

“Dear uncle, you remember the youth who suddenly appeared to us in the moonlight here a few evenings ago?”

“Ah, indeed!” said the monk,—­“what of him?”

“Father Francesco has told me dreadful things of him this morning.”

“What things?”

“Uncle, he is excommunicated by our Holy Father the Pope.”

Father Antonio, as a member of one of the most enlightened and cultivated religious orders of the times, and as an intimate companion and disciple of Savonarola, had a full understanding of the character of the reigning Pope, and therefore had his own private opinion of how much his excommunication was likely to be worth in the invisible world.  He knew that the same doom had been threatened towards his saintly master, for opposing and exposing the scandalous vices which disgraced the high places of the Church; so that, on the whole, when he heard that this young man was excommunicated, so far from being impressed with horror towards him, he conceived the idea that he might be a particularly honest fellow and good Christian.  But then he did not hold it wise to disturb the faith of the simple-hearted by revealing to them the truth about the head of the Church on earth.