"This but makes my burden heavier, my responsibility greater," she wailed.

"God help me bear it!" Thus passed that incident so trifling in itself and so misunderstood by her.

But it was never forgotten, and from time to time she would allude to it as the sign which had been vouchsafed me and for which great should be my thankfulness and my joy.
Save for that, in the four years that followed, time flowed an uneventful course within the four walls of the big citadel--for beyond those four walls I was never once permitted to set foot; and although from time to time I heard rumours of doings in the town itself, of the affairs of the State whereof I was by right of birth the tyrant, and of the greater business of the big world beyond, yet so trained and schooled was I that I had no great desire for a nearer acquaintance with that world.
A certain curiosity did at times beset me, spurred not so much by the little that I heard as by things that I read in such histories as my studies demanded I should read.

For even the lives of saints, and Holy Writ itself, afford their student glimpses of the world.

But this curiosity I came to look upon as a lure of the flesh, and to resist.
Blessed are they who are out of all contact with the world, since to them salvation comes more easily; so I believed implicitly, as I was taught by my mother and by Fra Gervasio at my mother's bidding.
And as the years passed under such influences as had been at work upon me from the cradle, influences which had known no check save that brief one afforded by Gino Falcone, I became perforce devout and pious from very inclination.
Joyous transports were afforded me by the study of the life of that Saint Luigi of the noble Mantuan House of Gonzaga--in whom I saw an ideal to be emulated, since he seemed to me to be much in my own case and of my own estate--who had counted the illusory greatness of this world well lost so that he might win the bliss of Paradise.