tribulation and death so that her vow should be fulfilled. And hers was a
manner against which that strong man, my father, never could prevail.
She would stand before him white-faced and mute, never presuming to return
an answer to his pleading or to enter into argument.

"I have vowed," she would say, just once; and thereafter, avoiding his
fiery glance, she would bow her head meekly, fold her hands, the very
incarnation of long-suffering and martyrdom.

Anon, as the storm of his anger crashed about her, two glistening lines
would appear upon her pallid face, and her tears--horrid, silent weeping
that brought no trace of emotion to her countenance--showered down. At
that he would fling out of her presence and away, cursing the day in which
he had mated with a fool.

His hatred of these moods of hers, of the vow she had made which bade fair
to deprive him of his son, drove him ere long to hatred of the cause of it
all. A ghibelline by inheritance, he was not long in becoming an utter
infidel, at war with Rome and the Pontifical sway. Nor was he one to
content himself with passive enmity. He must be up and doing, seeking the
destruction of the thing he hated. And so it befell that upon the death of
Pope Clement (the second Medici Pontiff), profiting by the weak condition
from which the papal army had not yet recovered since the Emperor's
invasion and the sack of Rome, my father raised an army and attempted to
shatter the ancient yoke which Julius II had imposed upon Parma and
Piacenza when he took them from the State of Milan.

A little lad of seven was I at the time, and well do I remember the martial
stir and bustle there was about our citadel of Mondolfo, the armed
multitudes that thronged the fortress that was our home, or drilled and