“I do not know, my lord, how your conscience may be, but your body has certainly not been bettered by your pilgrimage.  I fear me that your journeyings by night have done you more harm than your journeyings by day, for had you gone to Jerusalem on foot you would have come back more sunburnt, indeed, but not so thin and weak.  Pay good heed to this one, and worship no longer such images as those, which, instead of reviving the dead, cause the living to die.  I would say more, but if your body has sinned it has been well punished, and I feel too much pity for you to add any further distress.”

When my Lord of Avannes heard these words, he was as sorry as he was ashamed.

“Madam,” he replied, “I have heard that repentance follows upon sin, and now I have proved it to my cost.  But I pray you pardon my youth, which could not have been punished save by the evil in which it would not believe.”

Thereupon changing her discourse, the lady made him lie down in a handsome bed, where he remained for a fortnight, taking nothing but restoratives; and the lady and her husband constantly kept him company, so that he always had one or the other beside him.  And although he had acted foolishly, as you have heard, contrary to the desire and counsel of the virtuous lady, she, nevertheless, lost nought of the virtuous love that she felt towards him, for she still hoped that, after spending his early youth in follies, he would throw them off and bring himself to love virtuously, and so be all her own.

During the fortnight that he was in her house, she held to him such excellent discourse, all tending to the love of virtue, that he began to loathe the folly that he had committed.  Observing, moreover, the lady’s beauty, which surpassed that of the wanton one, and becoming more and more aware of the graces and virtues that were in her, he one day, when it was rather dark, could not longer hold from speaking, but, putting away all fear, said to her—­

“I see no better means, madam, for becoming a virtuous man such as you urge me and desire me to be, than by being heart and soul in love with virtue.  I therefore pray you, madam, to tell me whether you will give me in this matter all the assistance and favour that you can.”

The lady rejoiced to find him speaking in this way, and replied—­

“I promise you, my lord, that if you are in love with virtue as it beseems a lord like yourself to be, I will assist your efforts with all the strength that God has given me.”

“Now, madam,” said my Lord of Avannes, “remember your promise, and consider also that God, whom man knows by faith alone, deigned to take a fleshly nature like that of the sinner upon Himself, in order that, by drawing our flesh to the love of His humanity, He might at the same time draw our spirits to the love of His divinity, thus making use of visible means to make us in all faith love the things which are invisible.  In like manner this virtue, which