Falcone would be taking his departure. Silence was habitual with us at
meal-times, eating being performed--like everything else in that drab
household--as a sort of devotional act. Occasionally the silence would be
relieved by readings aloud from some pious work, undertaken at my mother's
bidding by one or another of the amanuenses.

But on the night in question there was just silence, broken chiefly by the
toothless slobber of the castellan over the soft meats that were especially
prepared for him. And there was something of grimness in that silence; for
none--and Fra Gervasio less than any--approved the unchristian thing that
out of excess of Christianity my mother had done in driving old Falcone
forth.

Myself, I could not eat at all. My misery choked me. The thought of that
old servitor whom I had loved being sent a wanderer and destitute, and all
through my own weakness, all because I had failed him in his need, just as
I had failed myself, was anguish to me. My lip would quiver at the
thought, and it was with difficulty that I repressed my tears.

At last that hideous repast came to an end in prayers of thanksgiving whose
immoderate length was out of all proportion to the fare provided.

The castellan shuffled forth upon the arm of the seneschal; Lorenza
followed at a sign from my mother, and we three--Gervasio, my mother, and
I--were left alone.

And here let me say a word of Fra Gervasio. He was, as I have already
written, my father's foster-brother. That is to say, he was the child of a
sturdy peasant-woman of the Val di Taro, from whose lusty, healthy breast
my father had suckled the first of that fine strength that had been his