I let her wander on even farther, while I slowly readjusted my wits. “Yet you might spare your blushes, Gualtiero. Wiser and cleverer men than you have loved nuns, yes, and been none the worse for it. The nephew of his one-time Holiness, Urban the Sixth, had such an intrigue, and the indulgent Pope actually issued a dispensation to him and let him marry the wench. You might get the same, though if truth be told, you have not ingratiated yourself with the Vatican lately. Still if you have kept your fortune--” But here I rose to my feet. “Marianna di Forli,” spoke I, and my voice shook, “if you would converse with me as friend and not as foe, do not let the name of that nun again cross your lips. What we are to each other and what we will be to each other is something so high, so holy, so ineffable that never in any tongue I can speak could you learn to understand me. I have no intrigue with the lady you have so lightly named, and I forbid you to discuss her further.” “Then Dante sighs hopelessly from afar for his Beatrice,” said she, demurely; “very good, I merely wished to show that I was not playing the part of jealousy.” “What part you are playing, Madonna,” I replied sourly, “I confess is to me quite hid, the more as by your own confession you have kept a marvellously sharp watch upon my doings. You know, then, that I am utterly committed to the cause of that Wittenberg friar whom the Church, with paternal benignity, is seeking to consign to the flames. You know that I broke with you finally at Palaestro. What now are you seeking?” She looked up at me steadily, striving to catch me with her glorious eyes. If mortal could have been ensnared by a pagan goddess, I were lost hopelessly. “Hear then, Gualtiero,” spoke she, and her voice rose and sobbed like some plaintive æolian harp, “hear then, I come to save you from yourself.” “Myself? Am I my own enemy?” “Your own worst enemy, Gualtiero. Your own noble qualities betray you. You were nurtured in Italy, but a false loyalty to your father’s last injunctions held you to a destructive pride in your German ancestry. Because you dreamed you found something noble in the utterances of that Wittenberg heretic, you also dreamed it was your duty to defend him. Even as your forefathers deemed it noble to toss their lives away against the infidel, one man against twenty, so you, again hopelessly beset, have allowed your fine chivalry to ruin you. You dwell in a world of dreams, of gossamer hopes, of unrealities. You have followed this friar even to Worms. Then your foam bubble will burst. What will you find? A heretic’s bonfire, your friends’ favor forfeited, your fortune imperiled, your body and soul jeopardized by the ban of the Church. And from all this I--I, who have been so much to you, will save you yet.” “I thank you for your solicitude, Madonna,” was my rejoinder. I confess when she spoke of “unrealities” I thought of our life at Palaestro, and could scarce suppress a smile.