The reader will have gathered from a previous chapter that the conception which Agnes had formed as to the real position of her admirer from the reports of Giulietta was false, and that in reality he was not Lord Adrian, the brother of the king, but an outcast and landless representative of one branch of an ancient and noble Roman family, whose estates had been confiscated and whose relations had been murdered, to satisfy the boundless rapacity of Cæsar Borgia, the infamous favourite of the notorious Alexander VI. The natural temperament of Agostino Sarelli had been rather that of the poet and artist than of the warrior. In the beautiful gardens of his ancestral home it had been his delight to muse over the pages of Dante and Ariosto, to sing to the lute, and to write in the facile flowing rhyme of his native Italian the fancies of the dream-land of his youth. He was the younger brother of the family and the favourite son and companion of his mother; who, being of a tender and religious nature, had brought him up in habits of the most implicit reverence and devotion for the institutions of his forefathers. The storm which swept over his house and blasted all his worldly prospects, blasted, too, and withered all those religious hopes and beliefs by which alone sensitive and affectionate natures can be healed of the wounds of adversity without leaving distortion or scar. For his house had been overthrown, his elder brother cruelly and treacherously murdered, himself and his retainers robbed and cast out, by a man who had the entire sanction and support of the head of the Christian Church, the Vicar of Christ on Earth. So said the current belief of his times—the faith in which his sainted mother died; and the difficulty with which a man breaks away from such ties is in exact proportion to the refinement and elevation of his nature.