“By what right did you make of him a votive offering? By what right did you seek to consecrate a child unborn to a claustral life without thought of his character, without reck of the desires that should be his? By what right did you make yourself the arbiter of the future of a man unborn?” “By what right?” quoth she. “Are you a priest, and do you ask me by what right I vowed him to the service of God?” “And is there, think you, no way of serving God but in the sterility of the cloister?” he demanded. “Why, since no man is born to damnation, and since by your reasoning the world must mean damnation, then all men should be encloistered, and soon, thus, there would be an end to man. You are too arrogant, Madonna, when you presume to judge what pleases God. Beware lest you fall into the sin of the Pharisee, for often have I seen you stand in danger of it.” She swayed as if her strength were failing her, and again her pale lips moved. “Enough, Fra Gervasio! I will go,” I cried. “Nay, it is not yet enough,” he answered, and strode down the room until he stood between her and me. “He is what you have made him,” he repeated in denunciation. “Had you studied his nature and his inclinations, had you left them free to develop along the way that God intended, you would have seen whether or not the cloister called him; and then would have been the time to have taken a resolve. But you thought to change his nature by repressing it; and you never saw that if he was not such as you would have him be, then most surely would you doom him to damnation by making an evil priest of him. “In your Pharisaic arrogance, Madonna, you sought to superimpose your will to God's will concerning him--you confounded God's will with your own. And so his sins recoil upon you as much as upon any. Therefore, Madonna, do I bid you beware. Take a humbler view if you would be acceptable in the Divine sight. Learn to forgive, for I say to you to-day that you stand as greatly in need of forgiveness for the thing that Agostino has done, as does Agostino himself.” He paused at last, and stood trembling before her, his eyes aflame, his high cheek-bones faintly tinted. And she measured him very calmly and coldly with her sombre eyes. “Are you a priest?” she asked with steady scorn. “Are you indeed a priest?” And then her invective was loosened, and her voice shrilled and mounted as her anger swayed her. “What a snake have I harboured here!” she cried. “Blasphemer! You show me clearly whence came the impiety and ungodliness of Giovanni d'Anguissola. It had the same source as your own. It was suckled at your mother's breast.” A sob shook him. “My mother is dead, Madonna!” he rebuked her. “She is more blessed, then, than I; since she has not lived to see what a power for sin she has brought forth. Go, pitiful friar. Go, both of you. You are very choicely mated. Begone from Mondolfo, and never let me see either of you more.”