He never forgot that face.
To him it was all that was beautiful and regal, framed in its soft, golden hair, with its tender blue eyes, its smiling lips. A slender youth, barely eighteen years of age, with the eyes of a dreamer, Conradino was possessed of an exaltation which blinded him to the perils of the situation, intoxicating his ambition,—a quaint combination of the mystic lore of his tunes, of which Francesco felt himself to be his other Ego.
The crowds had dispersed by degrees, sweeping in the wake of the Swabian host towards the Capitol.
And Francesco stared motionless into space.
Was he indeed cast out from the communion of the world, from the contact of the living?
Had a mocking fate but cast him on the shores of life, that he might stand idly by, watching the waves bounding, leaping over each other?
He felt as one enslaved, his will-power paralyzed.
Yonder, where the setting sun spun golden vapors round the summits of the Capitoline Hill, there was the trend of a high, self-conscious purpose, as revealed in the impending death-struggle for the highest ideals of mankind.
What had he to oppose it?