in
of Beltraffio in the National Gallery,--more beautiful than I had
supposed possible, her deep, passionate eyes very tender and pitiful in
their pleading, beseeching glance. I hardly think I was frightened, or
even startled, but lay looking steadily at her as she stood in the
beating lightning.

Then she breathed, rather than articulated, with a voice that almost
brought tears, so infinitely sad and sorrowful was it, "I cannot sleep!"
and the liquid eyes grew more pitiful and questioning as bright tears
fell from them down the pale dark face.

The figure began to move slowly toward the door, its eyes fixed on mine
with a look that was weary and almost agonized. I leaped from the bed
and stood waiting. A look of utter gratitude swept over the face, and,
turning, the figure passed through the doorway.

Out into the shadow of the corridor it moved, like a drift of pallid
storm-cloud, and I followed, all natural and instinctive fear or
nervousness quite blotted out by the part I felt I was to play in giving
rest to a tortured soul. The corridors were velvet black; but the pale
figure floated before me always, an unerring guide, now but a thin mist
on the utter night, now white and clear in the bluish lightning through
some window or doorway.

Down the stairway into the lower hall, across the refectory, where the
great frescoed Crucifixion flared into sudden clearness under the fitful
lightning, out into the silent cloister.

It was very dark. I stumbled along the heaving bricks, now guiding
myself by a hand on the whitewashed wall, now by a touch on a column wet
with the storm. From all the eaves the rain was dripping on to the
pebbles at the foot of the arcade: a pigeon, startled from the capital
where it was sleeping, beat its way into the cloister close. Still the
white thing drifted before me to the farther side of the court, then
along the cloister at right angles, and paused before one of the many
doorways that led to the cells.

A sudden blaze of fierce lightning, the last now of the fleeting trail
of storm, leaped around us, and in the vivid light I saw the white face
turned again with the look of overwhelming desire, of beseeching pathos,
that had choked my throat with an involuntary sob when first I saw
Sister Maddelena. In the brief interval that ensued after the flash, and
before the roaring thunder burst like the crash of battle over the
trembling convent, I heard again the sorrowful words, "I cannot s