friend. "It pleaseth me that thou art pleased," he said.

Fra Giulio had answered with a sigh. It was hard for one who loved so
truly to get so near, yet be no nearer. "I could wish that thou also
shouldst take pleasure in this beauty, my Paolo, for thou art missing a
joy that God permits."

Then the youthful scholar had turned his eyes upon him silently; and it
had seemed to the old man, in his great love, that a sudden glory had
transfigured the grave young face like a consecration. He still
remembered the tones of that clear voice saying serenely: "My Father,
when God speaketh a message in our souls, the peace and beauty which
come to us as we follow its call, are in the measure which He hath
decreed for us."

Now that the convent rang with his triumphs, and Fra Paolo was often
absent from his cell on missions of honor, the old friar sometimes
wondered how many of those philosophic and scientific truths which had
made him famous as an original thinker had come to the lad in
glimmerings on that first night among the hills, when, turning to his
old friend and stretching out his hands with a solemn, imploring motion
which seemed to confess a desperate need of isolation, he had said only,
"Let me think!"

Had his seeming nearness to the stars in the convent _loggia_ brought
him a premonition of the later message which had made him the "friend
and master" of Galileo?

Did he develop his "Laws of Sound" in that voiceful silence; or was it
in that solitude he had first watched the gentle ebb and flow of his own