MARIO sprang from the couch and asked the brothers the way to the refectory--a small building on the Corso Magenta side of the convent’s domain separated by tortuous passages and a courtyard from the rest of the structure. It was on the southern wall of this humble edifice that Leonardo painted the Nazarene and the Twelve at table. Here the picture had spoken to the Milanese four hundred years ago, and here, for all who wished to look, it told still the story of the hour before Gethsemane. By long custom the Bernardines had thrown the place open every day at a certain hour; but Brother Sebastiano, in the light of Brother Ignazio’s black eye, had decided to break the rule to-day. Thus it fell out that when the frenzied reformers of society reached the gate to the arched passage on which the refectory opened they found it locked and bolted and barred. That was a condition calling for the use of axes, and it was the sound of these on the massive oak, ringing across the inner court and penetrating the crooked hallways, that brought Mario from his couch resolved to do something--he knew not what--to save the picture. “The _Last Supper!_ Our Leonardo!” he exclaimed. “It must be defended!” “But what can we do, Signor Forza?” asked Brother Sebastiano in despair. “Who can avail against their madness? Heaven shield us! The gate is yielding!” Mario, trusting to chance to find the way, started off in the direction of the clamour and the sound of crackling oak. With a common impulse the brothers followed, but he turned and besought them not to add fuel to the wrath of the mob. In a flash he realised that the religious as well as every other established order was an object of hatred to-day, and that the wild beast out there would be infuriated the more at sight of the cowl and the tonsured head. “Let me, at least, go with you!” Brother Sebastiano entreated him. “Yes; come and guide me to the refectory,” Mario said, catching his arm and leading him away, and with an upraised hand warning the others to stay behind. “But you will go back when I bid you?” “As you will, Honourable,” the prior acquiesced sadly, and they moved on toward the din at the gate. When they had threaded the gloom of many angular passages and emerged into the sunlight of the courtyard, Mario, seeing on the opposite side the little building that held the picture, asked Brother Sebastiano to return. “Not yet,” said the other. “If you enter it must be by the postern door, and I have the key.” “No, no!” Mario protested firmly. “You must come no farther. Give me the key. Go back, I beg you!” The workman sweats And little gets; The rich and fine On capons dine. Is this fair play? Oh, yes! priests say, For the good God wills it so. When his ear caught the last lines, jerked out in mighty chorus by the throng in Corso Magenta, Brother Sebastiano handed Mario the key. “Addio,” he said to him, pressing his hand. “Heaven guard you in this danger.”