The Duke of Milan, confessed, absolved, and his conscience pawned to a saint, had, on the virtue of that pledge, started in a humour of unbridled self-righteousness for the territory of Vercelli. With him went some four thousand troops, horse and footmen, a drain of bristling splendour from the city; yet the roaring hum of that city’s life, and the flash and sting thereof, were not appreciably lessened in the flying of its hornet swarm. Rather waxed they poignant in the general sense of a periodic emancipation from a hideous thralldom. The tyrant was gone, and for a time the intolerable incubus of him was lifted. But, for the moment, there was something more—a consciousness, within the precincts of the palace and beyond them, of a substituted atmosphere, in which the spirit experienced a strange self-expansion—other than mere relief from strain—which was foreign to its knowledge. Men felt it, and pondered, or laughed, or were sceptical according as their temperaments induced them. So, in droughty days, the little errant winds that blow from nowhere, rising and falling on a thought, affect us with a sense of the unaccountable. There was such a sweet odd zephyr abroad in Milan. The queer question was, Was the little gale a little mountebank gale, tumbling ephemerally for its living, or did it represent a permanent atmospheric change? A few days before Galeazzo’s departure, Bernardo—by special appointment _custos conscientiae ducalis_—had, while walking in the outer ward of the Castello with Cicada, happened upon the vision of a Franciscan monk, plump and rosy, but with inflammatory eyes, entering with Messer Jacopo through a private postern in the walls. He had saluted the jocund figure reverentially, as one necessarily sacred through its calling, and was standing aside with doffed bonnet, when the other, halting with an expression of good-humoured curiosity on his face, had greeted him, puffed and asthmatic, in his turn:— ’Peace to thee, my son! Can this be he of whom it might be said, "_Puer natus est nobis: et vocabitur nomen ejus, Magni Consilii Angelus_"?’ The Franciscan had rumbled the query at Jacopo, who had shrugged, and answered shortly: ’Well; ’tis Messer Bembo.’ ’So?’ had responded the monk, gratified; ’the David of our later generation?’ and instantly and ingratiatory he had waddled up, and, putting a prosperous hand on Bernardo’s shoulder, had bent to whisper hoarsely, and quite audibly to Cicada, into the boy’s ear:— ’Child—I know—I am to thank _thee_ for this summons.’ Then, before Bembo, wondering, could respond: ’Ay, ay; Saul’s ears are opened to the truth. The stars cannot lie. You sent for me, yourself their sainted emissary, to confirm the verdict. What! I might have failed to answer else. We know the Duke, eh? But, mum!’