“Then it will not be so bad. Naturally you wish to visit them ere very long. Why not at present? We shall miss you here, Gualtiero--miss you at cards and at the hunt, but _Deo volente_ not forever. Your Germans are a credulous folk, but I have travelled among them. They are not so vile as many of us suppose. So, then, my decision. Give ear.” His tone grew formal. “Seeing that the Conte di Palaestro has been unable to clear himself of prompting an attempt upon the Archbishop of Bari, I do declare that he has laid himself liable to the penalties of a great crime: but in the paternal mercy, never failing to the Holy See, and lest the full uncovering of the crime breed a great scandal in the Church, I do remit the major part of the punishment, and command that he depart to-morrow for his German estates, giving his word not to reënter Italy for one year, nor to return to Rome for two years.” “Your Holiness is very indulgent,” I said humbly. The Pope thrust out his right slipper upon the footstool. I knelt and kissed the shoe, and then bowed myself out into the antechamber. The card players dispersed. A little group was gathering around Bari to congratulate him upon his new prebend. “Lucky fellow,” Rocca was saying in my ear. “How loath the Pope was to do anything to you! With his chronic need for money he might have fined you fifty thousand scudi.” Forli, too, had like felicitations over the merciful outcome, but I answered both coldly. “I owe you no thanks, Eminenzas. This has been your plot, but my penalty. I warned in advance against your scheme. But for that sense of honor which you so little cultivate, and which you would never have exercised in my behalf, I could have passed the debt on to you, and gone scot free.” “We are grateful, Gualtiero, we are grateful,” Forli kept repeating. “Orosi did his work perfectly. No one is really to blame. But, _Dii Immortales!_ who could have dreamed that dolt of a Bari had wit enough to wear a chain shirt!” * * * * * A little later, in the gray dawn, before I left the Vatican, I stood alone for a little while with Marianna. I will not tell how she wept, accused herself and her father a thousand times for the “blunder,” or how I vowed to carry her miniature ever with me and to write from Padua and Augsburg, and again as soon as I reached my castle of Regenstein. “I will think of you always, always!” she kept declaring. “You will soon have other lovers, Madonna,” I said with sad truthfulness. “Never such a one as you, Gualtiero. Never such a one as you! I will never forget you. And who knows but that I may come even into your frozen North in search of you? For remember my saying: you are Italian, never German. You belong to the South, to us forever!” “Nevertheless,” I answered, “at present I fare toward the Northland.”