"Blasphemer!" she would cry in mingled terror and aversion, and upon that
word--the "Amen" to all their conferences in those last days they spent
together--she would turn, and dragging me with her, all stunned and
bewildered by something beyond my understanding, she would hurry me to the
chapel of the citadel, and there, before the high altar, prostrate herself
and spend long hours in awful sobbing intercessions.

And so the gulf between them widened until the day of his departure.

I was not present at their parting. What farewells may have been spoken
between them, what premonitions may have troubled one or the other that
they were destined never to meet again, I do not know.

I remember being rudely awakened one dark morning early in the year, and
lifted from my bed by arms to whose clasp I never failed to thrill. Close
to mine was pressed a hot, dark, shaven hawk-face; a pair of great eyes,
humid with tears, considered me passionately. Then a ringing voice--that
commanding voice that was my father's--spoke to Falcone, the man-at-arms
who attended him and who ever acted as his equerry.

"Shall we take him with us to the wars, Falcone?"

My little arms went round his neck and tightened there convulsively until
the steel rim of his gorget bit into them.

"Take me!" I sobbed. "Take me!"

He laughed for answer, with something of exultation in his voice. He swung
me to his shoulder, and held me poised there, looking up at me. And then