ask pardon of her fiance....  Pardon!  For what?  For having been wounded by him, wounded to the depths of her sensibility?  She felt that the charity of judgment recommended by the pious Cardinal was a difficult virtue.  It exercises a discipline of the entire heart, sometimes irreconcilable with the clearness of the intelligence.  Alba looked at her friend with a glance full of an astonishment, almost sorrowful, and she embraced her, saying: 

“Peppino is not worthy even to kiss the ground on which you tread, that is my opinion, and if he does not spend his entire life in trying to be worthy of you, it will be a crime.”

As for the Prince himself, the impulses which dictated to his fiancee words of apology when he was in the wrong, were not unintelligible to him, as they would have been to Hafner.  He thought that the latter had lectured his daughter, and he congratulated himself on having cut short at once that little comedy of exaggerated religious feeling.

“Never mind that,” said he, with condescension, “it is I who have failed in form.  For at heart you have always found me respectful of that which my fathers respected.  But times have changed, and certain fanaticisms are no longer admissible.  That is what I have wished to say to you in such a manner that you could take no offence.”

And he gallantly kissed Fanny’s tiny hand, not divining that he had redoubled the melancholy of that too-generous child.  The discord continued to be excessive between the world of ideas in which she moved and that in which the ruined Prince existed.  As the mystics say with so much depth, they were not of the same heaven.

Of all the chimeras which had lasted hours, God alone remained.  It sufficed the noble creature to say:  “My father is so happy, I will not mar his joy.”

“I will do my duty toward my husband.  I will be so good a wife that I will transform him.  He has religion.  He has heart.  It will be my role to make of him a true Christian.  And then I shall have my children and the poor.”  Such were the thoughts which filled the mind of the envied betrothed.  For her the journals began to describe the dresses already prepared, for her a staff of tailors, dressmakers, needlewomen and jewellers were working; she would have on her contract the same signature as a princess of the blood, who would be a princess herself and related to one of the most glorious aristocracies in the world.  Such were the thoughts she would no doubt have through life, as she walked in the garden of the Palais Castagna, that historical garden in which is still to be seen a row of pear-trees, in the place where Sixte-Quint, near death, gathered some fruit.  He tasted it, and he said to Cardinal Castagna—­playing on their two names, his being Peretti—­“The pears are spoiled.  The Romans have had enough.  They will soon eat chestnuts.”  That family anecdote enchanted Justus Hafner.  It seemed to him full of the most delightful humor.  He repeated it to his colleagues at the club, to his tradesmen, to it mattered not whom.  He did not even mistrust Dorsenne’s irony.