“Good even to you, cousin mine!  So you see I am as true to my appointment as if your name were Leonora or Camilla instead of Agostino.  How goes it with you?  I wanted to talk with you below, but I saw we must have a place without listeners.  Our friends the saints are too high in heavenly things to make mischief by eavesdropping.”

“Thank you, Cousin Carlos, for your promptness.  And now to the point.  Did your father, my uncle, get the letter I wrote him about a month since?”

“He did; and he bade me treat with you about it.  It’s an abominable snarl this they have got you into.  My father says, your best way is to come straight to him in France, and abide till things take a better turn:  he is high in favor with the King and can find you a very pretty place at court, and he takes it upon him in time to reconcile the Pope.  Between you and me, the old Pope has no special spite in the world against you:  he merely wants your lands for his son, and as long as you prowl round and lay claim to them, why, you must stay excommunicated; but just clear the coast and leave them peaceably and he will put you back into the True Church, and my father will charge himself with your success.  Popes don’t last forever, or there may come another falling out with the King of France, and either way there will be a chance of your being one day put back into your rights; meanwhile, a young fellow might do worse than have a good place in our court.”

During this long monologue, which the young speaker uttered with all the flippant self-sufficiency of worldly people with whom the world is going well, the face of the young nobleman who listened presented a picture of many strong contending emotions.

“You speak,” he said, “as if man had nothing to do in this world but seek his own ease and pleasure.  What lies nearest my heart is not that I am plundered of my estates, and my house uprooted, but it is that my beautiful Rome, the city of my fathers, is a prisoner under the heel of the tyrant.  It is that the glorious religion of Christ, the holy faith in which my mother died, the faith made venerable by all these saints around us, is made the tool and instrument of such vileness and cruelty that one is tempted to doubt whether it were not better to have been born of heathen in the good old times of the Roman Republic,—­God forgive me for saying so!  Does the Most Christian King of France know that the man who pretends to rule in the name of Christ is not a believer in the Christian religion,—­that he does not believe even in a God,—­that he obtained the holy seat by simony,—­that he uses all its power to enrich a brood of children whose lives are so indecent that it is a shame to modest lips even to say what they do?”