“Look you,” he said to a servant in violet livery who was waiting by the door, “follow yonder Capuchin and bring me word where he abides.—­He may be cracked,” he said to himself; “but, after all, one of his blood may be worth mending, and do us good service either in Florence or Milan.  We must have him transferred to some convent here, where we can lay hands on him readily, if we want him.”

Meanwhile Father Francesco wends his way through many a dark and dingy street to an ancient Capuchin convent, where he finds brotherly admission.  Weary and despairing is he beyond all earthly despair, for the very altar of his God seems to have failed him.  He asked for bread, and has got a stone,—­he asked a fish, and has got a scorpion.  Again and again the worldly, almost scoffing, tone of the superior to whom he has been confessing sounds like the hiss of a serpent in his ear.

But he is sent for in haste to visit the bedside of the Prior, who has long been sick and failing, and who gladly embraces this opportunity to make his last confession to a man of such reputed sanctity in his order as Father Francesco.  For the acute Father Johannes, casting about for various means to empty the Superior’s chair at Sorrento, for his own benefit, and despairing of any occasion of slanderous accusation, had taken the other tack of writing to Rome extravagant laudations of such feats of penance and saintship in his Superior as in the view of all the brothers required that such a light should no more be hidden in an obscure province, but be set on a Roman candlestick, where it might give light to the faithful in all parts of the world.  Thus two currents of worldly intrigue were uniting to push an unworldly man to a higher dignity than he either sought or desired.

When a man has a sensitive or sore spot in his heart, from the pain of which he would gladly flee to the ends of the earth, it is marvellous what coincidences of events will be found to press upon it wherever he may go.  Singularly enough, one of the first items in the confession of the Capuchin Superior related to Agnes, and his story was in substance as follows.  In his youth he had been induced by the persuasions of the young son of a great and powerful family to unite him in the holy sacrament of marriage with a protegee of his mother’s; but the marriage being detected, it was disavowed by the young nobleman, and the girl and her mother chased out ignominiously, so that she died in great misery.  For his complicity in this sin the conscience of the monk had often troubled him, and he had kept track of the child she left, thinking perhaps some day to make reparation by declaring the true marriage of her mother, which now he certified upon the holy cross, and charged Father Francesco to make known to one of that kin whom he named.  He further informed him, that this family, having fallen under the displeasure of the Pope and his son, Caesar Borgia, had been banished from the city, and their