antom.

For awhile the stranger stood motionless, gazing up at the house. It
was in some sort a type of the wretched dwellings in the suburb; a
tumble-down hovel, built of rough stones, daubed over with a coat of
yellowish stucco, and so riven with great cracks that there seemed to
be danger lest the slightest puff of wind might blow it down. The roof,
covered with brown moss-grown tiles, had given way in several places,
and looked as though it might break down altogether under the weight of
the snow. The frames of the three windows on each story were rotten with
damp and warped by the sun; evidently the cold must find its way inside.
The house standing thus quite by itself looked like some old tower
that Time had forgotten to destroy. A faint light shone from the attic
windows pierced at irregular distances in the roof; otherwise the whole
building was in total darkness.

Meanwhile the old lady climbed not without difficulty up the rough,
clumsily built staircase, with a rope by way of a hand-rail. At the door
of the lodging in the attic she stopped and tapped mysteriously; an old
man brought forward a chair for her. She dropped into it at once.

"Hide! hide!" she exclaimed, looking up at him. "Seldom as we leave the
house, everything that we do is known, and every step is watched----"

"What is it now?" asked another elderly woman, sitting by the fire.

"The man that has been prowling about the house yesterday and to-day,
followed me to-night----"

At those words all three dwellers in the wretched den looked in each
other's faces and did not try to dissimulate the profound dread that
they felt. The old priest was the least overcome, probably because
he ran the greatest danger. If a brave man is weighed down by great
calamities or the yoke of persecution, he begins, as it were, by making
the sacrifice of himself; and thereafter every day of his life becomes
one more victory snatched from fate. But from the way in which the women
looked at him it was easy to see that their intense anxiety was on his
account.

"Why should our faith in God fail us, my sisters?" he said, in low but
fervent tones. "We sang His praises through the shrieks of murderers and
their victims at the Carmelites. If it was His will that I should come
alive out of that butchery, it was, no doubt, because I was reserved for
some fate which I am bound to endure without murmuring. God will protect
His own; He can do with them according to His will