Once or twice I caught him
talking to himself.
"To be sure it was enough to madden all the saints: and the Prince is
not one of them. . . ."
"What was enough to madden all the saints, O Marc'antonio?" I asked
from my bed.
Already he had turned in some confusion, surprised by the sound of
his own voice. He was down on hands and knees, and had been blowing
upon the embers of a wood fire, kindled under a pan of goat's milk.
The goat herself browsed in the sunlight beyond the doorway, in the
circuit allowed by a twenty-foot tether.
"What was enough to madden all the saints, O Marc'antonio?"
"Why," said he, savagely, "your standing up to him and denying his
birth and his sister's before all the crowd. I did not think that
anything could have saved you."
"If I remember, I added that the Queen Emilia's bare word would be
enough for me."
"So. But you denied it on his father's, and that is what his
enemies, the Paolists all, would give their ears to hear--yes, and
Pasquale Paoli himself, though he passes for a just man."
"Marc'antonio," said I, seriously, "are the Prince and Princess in
truth the children of King Theodore?"
"As God hears me, cavalier, they are his twin children, born in the
convent of Santa Maria di Fosciandora, in the valley of the Serchio,
some leagues to the north of Florence; and on the feast-day of Saint
Mark these sixteen years ago.
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