mother's soul. And but that St. Monica had wed and borne a son, I do not
believe that my mother would ever have adventured herself within the bonds
of wedlock.

How often in the stressful, stormy hours of my most unhappy youth did I not
wish that she had preferred the virginal life of the cloister, and thus
spared me the heavy burden of an existence which her unholy and mistaken
saintliness went so near to laying waste!

I like to think that in the days when my father wooed her, she forgot for a
spell in the strong arms of that fierce ghibelline the pattern upon which
it had become her wont to weave her life; so that in all that drab,
sackcloth tissue there was embroidered at least one warm and brilliant
little wedge of colour; so that in all that desert waste, in all that
parched aridity of her existence, there was at least one little patch of
garden-land, fragrant, fruitful, and cool.

I like to think it, for at best such a spell must have been brief indeed;
and for that I pity her--I, who once blamed her so very bitterly. Before
ever I was born it must have ceased; whilst still she bore me she put from
her lips the cup that holds the warm and potent wine of life, and turned
her once more to her fasting, her contemplations, and her prayers.

That was in the year in which the battle of Pavia was fought and won by the
Emperor. My father, who had raised a condotta to lend a hand in the
expulsion of the French, was left for dead upon that glorious field.
Afterwards he was found still living, but upon the very edge and border of
Eternity; and when the news of it was borne to my mother I have little
doubt but that she imagined it to be a visitation--a punishment upon her
for having strayed for that brief season of her adolescence from the narrow