ct--in the purest French, or in equally good Italian, just as you
chose. I managed to interest and to animate him by touching, as we
wandered through the great halls, on the troubles which his late master
had had to go through, and by showing that I was, to some extent,
acquainted with the subject, and with what had happened in those bygone
days. He explained the deeper meaning of many of the paintings and
adornments (which, to the uninitiated, seemed mere unmeaning
prettinesses), and grew more and more frank and confidential. At last
he opened a small closet, floored with slabs of white marble, in which
the only piece of furniture was a cauldron of brass. The walls seemed
to have been stripped of their former adornments. I knew, I felt, that
I was in the place where the former master of the house, blinded and
befooled by his lust for sensuous enjoyment, had descended to
diabolical practices. When I dropped a word or two hinting at this
subject, the old man raised his eyes to heaven with an expression of
the bitterest melancholy, and said, with a deep sigh, 'Ah! Holy Virgin!
hast thou forgiven him?' He then silently pointed to a large marble
slab embedded in the middle of the flooring. I looked at this slab with
much closeness of observation, and became aware that there were reddish
veins meandering about through the stone. And, as I fixed my attention
upon them more and more closely, heaven aid me! the features of a human
face grew more and more distinctly traceable and visible, just as when,
on looking at a distorted picture through a lens specially constructed,
all its lines and effects then, and not till then, grow clear and
sharp.

"It was the face of a child that was looking at me out of that stone,
marked with the heartrending anguish of the agony of death. I could see
drops of blood welling from the breast; but the rest of the form of the
body seemed to flow vaguely into indistinctness, as if a stream of
water were carrying it away. It was with a hard struggle that I
overcame the horror which well-nigh overmastered me. I could not bring
myself to utter a word. We left that terrible, mysterious place in
silence. Not till I had walked about in the park and the lawns for some
time could I overcome the inexplicable feeling which had so annulled my
enjoyment of that little earthly paradise. From many things which I
gathered from the detached utterances of the old man, I was led to
conclude that the crazy being who ha