"It should serve some great end," said Don Silverio, not knowing very
well what he meant or to what he desired to move the young man's
mind. "Nobility of blood should make the hands cleaner, the heart
higher, the aims finer."

Adone had shrugged his shoulders.

"We are all equal!" he answered.

"We are not all equal," the priest said curtly. "There is not
equality in nature. Are there even two pebbles alike in the bed of
the river?"

Don Silverio, for the first time in his life, could have willingly
let escape him some unholy word. It incensed him that he could not
arouse in the boy any of that interest and excitement which had moved
his own feelings so strongly as he had spent his spare evenings
poring over the crabbed characters and the dust-weighted vellum of
the charred and mutilated archives discovered by him in a secret
closet in the bell-tower of his church. With infinite toil, patience,
and ability he had deciphered the Latin of rolls, registers, letters,
chronicles, so damaged by water, fire, and the teeth of rats and
mice, that it required all an archæologist's ingenuity and devotion
to make out any sense from them. Summer days and winter nights had
found him poring over the enigma of these documents, and now, when he
had conquered and revealed their secret, he who was most concerned in
it was no more stirred by curiosity or pride than if he had been one
of the big tawny owls dwelling in the dusk of the belfry.

Don Silverio was a learned man and a holy man, and should have