Perfumed with sandalwood, in a white, gold-stitched robe, its bodice tight, its skirts voluminous, she welcomed him in the hall.  The reception over, old Baldo spoke with the crone who served Madonna Gemma as maid: 

“I do not know what this pretty little fellow has in mind.  While I watch him for spying, do you watch him for love-making.  If we discover him at either, perhaps he has caught that new green-sickness from the north, and thinks himself a singing-bird.”

A singing-bird was what Raffaele Muti proved to be.

In the Mediterranean lands a new idea was beginning to alter the conduct of society.  Woman, so long regarded as a soulless animal, born only to drag men down, was being transfigured into an immaculate goddess, an angel in human shape, whose business was man’s reformation, whose right was man’s worship.

That cult of Woman had been invented by the lute-playing nobles of Provence.  But quickly it had begun to spread from court to court, from one land to another.  So now, in Italy, as in southern France, sometimes in wild hill castles as well as in the city palaces, a hymn of adoration rose to the new divinity.

This was the song that Raffaele Muti, plucking at his twelve harp strings, raised in the hall of the Big Hornets’ Nest at twilight.

He sat by the fireplace on the guests’ settee, beside Madonna Gemma.  The torches, dripping fire in the wall-rings, cast their light over the faces of the wondering servants.  The harp twanged its plaintive interlude; then the song continued, quavering, soaring, athrob with this new pathos and reverence, that had crept like the counterfeit of a celestial dawn upon a world long obscured by a brutish dusk.

Raffaele Muti sang of a woman exalted far above him by her womanhood, which rivalled Godhood in containing all the virtues requisite for his redemption.  Man could no longer sin when once she had thought pityingly of him.  Every deed must be noble if rooted in love of her.  All that one asked was to worship her ineffable superiority.  How grievously should one affront her virtue if ever one dreamed of kisses!  But should one dream of them, pray God she might never stoop that far in mercy!  No, passion must never mar this shrine at which Raffaele knelt.

In the ensuing silence, which quivered from that cry, there stole into the heart of Madonna Gemma an emotion more precious, just then, than the peace that follows absolution—­a new-born sense of feminine dignity, a glorious blossoming of pride, commingled with the tenderness of an immeasurable gratitude.

About to part for the night, they exchanged a look of tremulous solemnity.

Her beauty was no longer bleak, but rich—­all at once too warm, perhaps, for a divinity whose only office was the guidance of a troubadour toward asceticism.  His frail comeliness was radiant from his poetical ecstasy—­of a sudden too flushed, one would think, for a youth whose aspirations were all toward the intangible.  Then each emerged with a start from that delicious spell, to remember the staring servants.