hero might not step forth from obscurity and gain the great prize
of this fair hand of Pacifica's? And with her hand would go many
a broad gold ducat, and heritage of the wide old gray stone house,
and many an old jewel and old brocade that were kept there in dusky
sweet-smelling cabinets, and also more than one good piece of land,
smiling with corn and fruit trees, outside the gates in the lower
pastures to the westward.

Luca, indeed, never thought of these things, but the other three
pupils did, and other youths as well. Had it not been for the
limitation as to birth within the duchy, many a gallant young
painter from the other side of the Apennines, many a lusty
vasalino or boccalino from the workshops of fair Florence herself,
or from the Lombard cities, might have traveled there in hot haste
as fast as horses could carry them, and come to paint the clay for
the sake of so precious a recompense. But Urbino men they had to
be; and poor Luca, who was so full of despair that he could almost
have thrown himself headlong from the rocks, was thankful to
destiny for even so much slender mercy as this,--that the number
of his rivals was limited.

"Had I been you," Giovanni Sanzio ventured once to say
respectfully to Signor Benedetto, "I think I should have picked
out for my son-in-law the best youth that I knew, not the best
painter; for be it said in all reverence, my friend, the greatest
artist is not always the truest man, and by the hearthstone humble
virtues have sometimes high claim."

Then Signor Benedetto had set his stern face like a flint, knowing
very well what youth Messer Giovanni would have liked to name to