Tarsis’s course lay past the Chapel of Santa Maria delle Grazie, where the _Last Supper_ of Leonardo da Vinci survives. Thence, by one or two turnings, he reached the Corso Porta Ticinese. Never had he seen that thoroughfare, always teeming with life, so crowded. The people swarmed in from all directions and overran the sidewalks. He encountered groups of workmen singing labour songs or listening to heated oratory which was a confusion of old prejudice and new thought. A little farther and he was in the heart of the quarter. There were now no vistas of gardens through arched porticos. Here and there a withering flower on a window ledge struggled for life. The champion of vested interests was vaguely sensible of a sneer in the air--an impalpable ghost that grinned at stock ideas. A dead cat whizzed from somewhere and struck a passing carbineer, who looked back with a curse, which the men returned in kind and the women with hisses. In a café that had a marionette show a drama was under way. It was called _The Man and the Master_. Every time the Man belaboured the Master with a club--which was very often--the bravos of the audience were loud and long. Tarsis was seeing the social picture at close range, but it did not give him a new appreciation. His mind was not receptive that night. He had not entered poverty’s region for observation and study, but to seek out the one human creature in the world to whom he was willing to intrust the task of exacting payment from Mario Forza. For the time being his whole existence was centred upon that design. He came to the old octagonal church of San Lorenzo. From a pulpit outside a priest was preaching the gospel of peace. Most of the auditors were bare-headed women, whose faces, as they listened, were blank; some of them wore a look of dull scepticalness. On the skirts of the assemblage younger persons larked among themselves or scoffed in an undertone at what the priest said--an irreverence that did not seem to grate upon anybody’s sensibilities. At times the preacher’s voice was drowned by the _Marseillaise_ coming in mighty chorus from a tavern. When a bag on the end of a long pole wielded by a brawny-armed sacristan was passed among the congregation the coppers chinked, as of old, to the honour of the Lombardian proverb, “The hand of the poor is the purse of God.” News-sellers shouted the name of a revolutionary journal. In big headlines the revolt of the silk workers was heralded and the military berated for shooting down the window-smashers. The papers were so held in the arms of the vendors that Tarsis saw the cartoon that had been dashed off and published on his wedding day. The editor “had judged the events of the morning a fit reason for recalling it to patriotic use, as the Minister of War had recalled some of his reserves to service.” Wherever Tarsis looked he beheld his punched nose and the flow of gold pieces.