He spoke perfectly gravely, and made her a little courtly gesture backwards. ’Well,’ said she, ’had _I_ been Father Abbot, I had put this pet of my fancy in a cage.’ ’You know not of what you speak,’ he answered seriously. ’God works great ends with little instruments. The puny bee is yet the very fairy midwife of the forests, I should have broke my heart had he denied me.’ ’It would have saved others, alack!’ ’What do you mean?’ ’Nothing at all. Will you sing me another parable, Bernardo?’ ’Ay, Madonna; and on what subject? The woman taken in adultery?’ ’If you like; and whom Christ forgave.’ ’_And He said: "Go, and sin no more"_’ She began to weep softly. ’It is shocking to be so abused for a little thing. I would you were back with your monks.’ He sighed. ’Ah!’ she murmured, still weeping, ’that this bee had been content to remain a pander to his flowers! To dup hell’s door with a reed! You know not to what you have engaged yourself, my poor boy.’ ’To Christ, His service of Love,’ he said simply. ’Go back, go back!’ she cried in pain. ’There are ten thousand sophisters to interpret that word according to their lusts. Convert Galeazzo? Convert the brimstone lake from burning! Dost know the manner of man he is?’ ’Else why am I here?’ ’Ay, but his moods, his passions, his nameless, shameless deeds? He hath no pity but for his desires; no mercy but through his caprices. To cross him is to taste the rack, the fire, the living burial. He is possessed. Some believe him Caligula reincarnate—an atavism of that dreadful stock. And dost think to quench that furnace with a parable? Unless, indeed—Go back, little Bembo, and waste thy passion for reform on thy monks.’ ’Madonna,’ he said, ’I obey the voices. I shall not be let to perish, since Christ died to save His world to loveliness.’ It was the early rapture of the renaissance, penetrating like an April song into these newly reclaimed lands. The wind blew from Florence, and all the peaceful vales, so long trodden into a bloody mire, were awakening to the ecstasy of the _Promise_. That men interpreted according to their lights—lights burning fast and passionate in most places, but in a few quiet and holy. The breed of German bandits, of foreign mercenaries, was swept away. Gone was the whole warring race of the Visconti, and in its place the peasant Sforza had set a guard about the land of his fierce adoption, that he might till and graft and prosper in peace. Italy had asserted itself the inheritance of its children, the Court of God’s Vicegerent, the chosen land of Love’s gospel. That, too, men interpreted according to their lights. ’We are all the vineyard of Rome,’ said the little Parablist. Alas! he thought Rome the Holy of Holies, and his father a saint. But his father, who adored him, had committed him, with his blessing, to this mad romance! Such were the paradoxes of the Gospel of Love.