wards the alcove-room.

"Are you ready to start?" said Luisa, in that voice which seemed to come
from a far-away world. "Good-bye."

He came to her side, and stooped to kiss the little stocking she held.
"Luisa," he whispered, "the Prefect of Caravina is here." She did not
express the slightest astonishment. "Grandmother sent for him an hour or
two ago," Franco continued. "She told him she had seen our Maria,
shining like an angel."

"Oh, what a lie!" Luisa exclaimed, in a tone full of contempt, but not
angrily. "As if it were possible she would go to her and not come to
me!"

"Maria has touched her heart," Franco went on. "She begs us to pardon
her. She fears she is dying, and entreats me to come to her, to bring
her a word of peace from you also."

Franco himself did not believe in the apparition, being profoundly
sceptical of everything that was supernatural outside of religion, but
he did believe that Maria, in her higher state, had already been able to
work a miracle, and touch his grandmother's heart, and the thought
caused him indescribable emotion. Luisa remained like ice. She was not
even irritated, as Franco had feared she would be, by the proposal to
send a friendly message. "Your grandmother fears hell," she observed
with her mortal coldness. "Hell does not exist, and so all this amounts
to nothing more than a fright. The suffering is not great. Let her bear
it, and then die as we all must, and so, 'Amen.'" Franco saw it would be
useless to insist. "Then I will go," said he. She was silent.

"I don't think I shall be able to come back this way," Franco added. "I
shall have to take to the hills."

Still no answer.

"Luisa!" the young man said softly. Reproach, grief, passion, all these
were in his appeal. Luisa's hands, that had never once paused in their
work, now became still. She murmured:

"I no longer feel anything. I am like a stone."

Franco turned faint. He kissed his wife on her hair, said good-bye, and
then entered the alcove, where, kneeling beside the little bed, he threw
his arms across it, recalling his treasure's little voice: "One kiss
more, papa!" A paroxysm of weeping assailed him, but he controlled
himself, and hurriedly left the room.

In the hall his friends were impatiently awaiting his return. How could
they start? They did not know the way. The lawyer was, indeed,
acquainted with the Boglia road, but was that the best way to go if they
wished to avoid the guards? On heari