which would cut his life in two, opening out new pathways for a "forward
march" to fame and fortune.

"When my little boy gets to be deputy," his mother would say in her rare
moments of affectionate expansiveness, "the girls will fight for him
because he is so handsome! And he'll marry a millionairess!"

Meanwhile, in long years of impatient anticipation, his life went on,
with no special circumstance to break its dull monotony--the life of an
aspirant certain of his lot, "killing time" till the call should come
to enter on his heritage. He was like those noble youngsters of bygone
centuries who, graced in their cradles by the rank of colonel from the
monarch, played around with hoop and top till they were old enough to
join their regiments. He had been born a deputy, and a deputy he was
sure to be: for the moment, he was waiting for his cue in the wings of
the theatre of life.

His trip to Italy on a pilgrimage to see the Pope was the one event that
had disturbed the dreary course of his existence. But in that country of
marvels, with a pious canon for a guide, he visited churches rather than
museums. Of theatres he saw only two--larks permitted by his tutor,
whose austerity was somewhat mollified in those changing scenes.
Indifferently they passed the famous artistic works of the Italian
churches, but paused always to venerate some relic with miracles as
famous as absurd. Even so, Rafael managed to catch a confused and
passing glimpse of a world different from the one in which he was
predestined to pass his life. From a distance he sensed something of the
love of pleasure and romance he had drunk in like an intoxicating wine
from his reading. In Milan he admired a gilded, adventurous bohemia of
opera; in Rome, the splendor of a refined, artistic aristocracy in