ry, as they say,
beneath one, and to marry money into the bargain,--that would be a
little too much like the fortune-hunter of tradition." He still sat
where she had left him, on the marble bench, disconsolate, when the
parroco approached hurriedly, from the direction of the house.

"Signore," the parroco began, out of breath, "I offer a thousand excuses
for venturing to disturb you, but my niece has suddenly fallen ill. I am
going to the village to telephone for a doctor. My cook is away, for her
Sunday afternoon. Might I pray you to have the extreme kindness to stay
with the child till I return? I don't know what is the matter, but she
fainted, and now is delirious, and, I'm afraid, very ill indeed."

"Good Heavens!" gasped John, forgetting everything else. "Of course, of
course."

And he set off hotfoot for the presbytery.

PART SIXTH

I

I would rather not dwell upon the details of Annunziata's illness. By
the mercy of Providence, she got well in the end; but in the mean time
those details were sufficiently painful. John, for example, found it
more than painful to hear her cry out piteously, as she often would in
her delirium, that she did not wish to be turned into a monkey; he hung
his head and groaned, and cursed the malinspired moment which had given
that chimaera birth. However, he had his compensations. Maria Dolores,
whom he had thought never to see again, he saw every day. "Let us hope
that you and she may never meet again." In his despairing heart the
words became a refrain. But an hour later the news of trouble at the
presbytery had travelled to the pavilion, and she flew straight to
Annunziata's bedside. Ever since, (postponing those threatened nuptials
at Mischenau), she had shared with John, and the parroco, and Marcella
the cook, the labours of nurse. And though it was arranged that the men,
turn and turn about, should watch by night, and the women by day, John,
by coming early and leaving late, contrived to make a good part of his
vigil and of hers coincident. And the strange result is that now,
looking backwards upon that period of pain and dread, when from minute
to minute no one knew what awful change the next minute might
bring,--looking backwards, and seeing again the small bare room,
cell-like, with its whitewashed walls, its iron cot, its Crucifix, its
narrow window (through which wide miles of valley shone), and then the
little white face and the brown curls tossing on the