My misery choked me.

The thought of that old servitor whom I had loved being sent a wanderer and destitute, and all through my own weakness, all because I had failed him in his need, just as I had failed myself, was anguish to me.

My lip would quiver at the thought, and it was with difficulty that I repressed my tears.
At last that hideous repast came to an end in prayers of thanksgiving whose immoderate length was out of all proportion to the fare provided.
The castellan shuffled forth upon the arm of the seneschal; Lorenza followed at a sign from my mother, and we three--Gervasio, my mother, and I--were left alone.
And here let me say a word of Fra Gervasio.

He was, as I have already written, my father's foster-brother.

That is to say, he was the child of a sturdy peasant-woman of the Val di Taro, from whose lusty, healthy breast my father had suckled the first of that fine strength that had been his own.
He was older than my father by a month or so, and as often happens in such cases, he was brought to Mondolfo to be first my father's playmate, and later, no doubt, to have followed him as a man-at-arms.