The lamp went out: the darkness was complete. I stretched my hands out,
to meet but empty air. If I were alone I could not tell: I touched
nothing, I heard nothing, I saw nothing. A strange giddiness came upon
me; my limbs trembled under the weight of my body and gave way; I lost
consciousness. It is what we call in this country a stroke of the blood.

When my senses revived I opened my eyes. It was still night about me,
but a pallid light shone into the chamber, for the moon had risen, and
its rays penetrated through the iron bars of the high windows. I
remembered all.

I rose with pain and effort: the heavy fall on the stone floor had
bruised and strained me. A great stupor, the stupor of horror, had
fallen upon me. I felt all at once old, quite old. The thought of my
mother passed through my mind for the first time for many days. My poor
mother!

By the light of the moon I tried to find my way out of this chamber--a
chamber accursed. I gained the entrance of the gallery. Silence reigned
everywhere. I could not tell what hour it was. The lustre from the skies
sufficed to illumine fitfully the vast and sombre passages. I found the
door by which I had entered the house, and I felt the hot air of the
night blow upon my forehead, as hot now as it had been at noonday.

I passed into the great open court. Above it hung the moon, late risen,
round, yellow, luminous. I looked upward at it: this familiar object
seemed to me a strange and unknown thing. I walked slowly across the
pavement of the courtyard on a sheer instinct, as you may see a wounded
dog walk, bearing death in him. My heart seemed like a stone in my
breast: my blood seemed like ice in my veins. All around me were the
walls of Sant' Aloisa, silent, gray, austere.

My foot touched something on the ground. I looked at it. It was a thing
without form--a block of oak wood or a slab of marble?--yet I looked at
it, and my eyes were rooted there and could not look elsewhere. The moon
shed a sinister white light upon this thing. I looked long, standing
there motionless and without power to move. Then I saw what it was, this
shapeless thing: it was the body of Taddeo Marchioni--dead, horribly
dead, fallen face downward, stretched out upon the stones, a knife
plunged into the back of the throat, and left there. He had been stabbed
from behind.

I looked, I saw, I understood: it was her act.

I stooped; I touched the corpse; I turned the face to the light; I
sear