crave of you as a high honour to kiss your feet, for I am less worth
than you, and your crimes are little compared with mine. Yet have I
received greater favours of Heaven than have been accorded to you. For
in the days when St. Francis and his twelve disciples were still upon
earth, I lived with Angels of Heaven."

And Satan returned:

"My Father, when I asked you an alms for the love of Him who loves you,
I was cherishing in my heart a wicked intent, and I am fain to tell you
what this was. I wander the roads a-begging, in order to collect a sum
of money I destine for a man of Perosa who is my paramour, and who has
promised me, on handling this money, to kill traitorously a certain
knight I hate, because when I offered my body to him, he scorned me.
Well! the total was yet incomplete; but now the weight of your silver
cup has made it up. So the alms you have given me will be the price of
blood. You have sold a just man to death. For the Knight I told you of
is chaste, temperate and pious, and I hate him for this cause. 'Tis you
will have brought about his murder. You have laid a weight of silver in
the scale of crime, to bear it down."

Hearing these words, the good Fra Giovanni wept, and drawing aside, he
fell on his knees in a thorn-brake, and prayed the Lord, saying:

"O Lord, make this crime to fall neither on this woman's head nor on
mine nor on that of any of Thy creatures, but let it be put beneath Thy
feet, which were pierced with the nails, and be washed in Thy most
precious blood. Distil on me and on this my sister of the highway a drop
of hyssop, and we shall be purified, and shall overpass the snow in
whiteness."