"On the contrary, I beg you to comment as severely as you please, Magnani. It will not humiliate me from you. I am not presumptuous enough to think that you like me, and I know that my childish faults will not cause you the slightest distress. It is because I know how dearly my father and Princess Agatha love me that I dread so to grieve them. But you can say whatever you please to me, for you will simply laugh at my foolishness." "So you think me very indifferent, do you?" said Magnani, upon whom this story of the monk had had a singularly disquieting and disturbing effect. Then, surprised at the question that had escaped him, he rose and went on tiptoe to listen at Michel's door. He thought that he could hear the regular breathing of a sleeping person. The Piccinino had in fact succeeded finally in allaying the tumult of his thoughts, and Michel, overcome by weariness, was dozing in his chair, with his head resting on his hands. Magnani returned to Mila; but he dared not sit beside her again. "And I too," he thought, ashamed, and as it were, afraid of himself, "I am a monk consumed by my imagination and excited by enforced continence. This child is too lovely, too pure, too trustful, to live thus the untrammelled neglected life of girls of our station; no one can look at her without emotion, whether he be a monk doomed to celibacy or a man hopelessly in love with another woman. I would like to have my hands on that vile monk and break his neck; and yet I too quiver at the thought that this unsuspecting maiden is in this room, alone with me, in the silence of night, ready to seek shelter in my arms at the slightest alarm!" XXXI WITCHCRAFT Magnani tried to divert his thoughts by talking of the princess with Mila. The innocent girl lured him into it, and he accepted that subject of conversation as a preservative. It will be seen that a strange revolution had taken place in two days in the young man's mental condition, since he had already reached the point of looking upon his love for Agatha as a duty, or as what the doctors call a depurative.