gostino, what do you tell me?" quoth she, and her voice quivered.

Now here was a deal of pother about a capuchin who had stared at the
Madonnino of Anguissola! The matter was out of all proportion to the
stir it made, and I conveyed in my next words some notion of that
opinion.

But she stared wistfully. "Never think it, Agostino," she besought me.
"You know not what it may import." And then she turned to Fra Gervasio.
"Who was this mendicant?" she asked.

He had by now recovered from his erstwhile confusion. But he was still
pale, and I observed that his hand trembled.

"He must have been one of the two little brothers of St. Francis on
their way, they said, from Milan to Loreto on a pilgrimage."

"Not those you told me are resting here until to-morrow?"

From his face I saw that he would have denied it had it lain within his
power to utter a deliberate falsehood.

"They are the same," he answered in a low voice.

She rose. "I must see this friar," she announced, and never in all my
life had I beheld in her such a display of emotion.

"In the morning, then," said Fra Gervasio. "It is after sunset," he
explained. "They have retired, and their rule..." He left the sentence
unfinished, but he had said enough to be understood by her.

She sank back to her chair, folded her hands in her lap and fell into
meditation. The faintest of flushes crept into her wax-like cheeks.

"If it should be a sign!" she murmured raptly, and then she turned again
to Fra Gervasio. "You heard Agostino say that he could not bear this
friar's gaze. You remember, brother, how a pilgrim appeared near San
Rufino to the nurse of Saint Francis, and took from her arms the child
that he might bless it ere once more he vanished? If this should be a
sign such as that!"

She clasped her hands together fervently. "I must see this friar ere he
departs again," she said to the staring, dumbfounded Fra Gervasio.

At last, then, I understood her emotion. All her life she had prayed
for a sign of grace for herself or for me, and she believed that here at
last was something that might well be discovered upon inquiry to be
an answer to her prayer. This capuchin who had stared at me from
the courtyard became at once to her mind--so ill-balanced upon such
matters--a supernatural visitant, harbinger, as it were, of my future
saintly glory.

But though she rose betimes upon the morrow, to see the holy man ere he
fared forth again, she was not early enou