r been trying the usual remedies,
an emetic and then magnesia. Just then, too, he had made Victorine whip
some whites of eggs in water. But the disorder was progressing with such
lightning-like rapidity that all succour was becoming futile. Undressed
and lying on his back, his bust propped up by pillows and his arms lying
outstretched over the sheets, Dario looked quite frightful in the sort of
painful intoxication which characterised that redoubtable and mysterious
disorder to which already Monsignor Gallo and others had succumbed. The
young man seemed to be stricken with a sort of dizzy stupor, his eyes
receded farther and farther into the depth of their dark sockets, whilst
his whole face became withered, aged as it were, and covered with an
earthy pallor. A moment previously he had closed his eyes, and the only
sign that he still lived was the heaving of his chest induced by painful
respiration. And leaning over his poor dying face stood Benedetta,
sharing his sufferings, and mastered by such impotent grief that she also
was unrecognisable, so white, so distracted by anguish, that it seemed as
if death were gradually taking her at the same time as it was taking him.

In the recess by the window whither Cardinal Boccanera had led Doctor
Giordano, a few words were exchanged in low tones. "He is lost, is he
not?"

The doctor made the despairing gesture of one who is vanquished: "Alas!
yes. I must warn your Eminence that in an hour all will be over."

A short interval of silence followed. "And the same malady as Gallo, is
it not?" asked the Cardinal; and as the doctor trembling and averting his
eyes did not answer he added: "At all events of an infectious fever!"

Giordano well understood what the Cardinal thus asked of him: silence,
the crime for ever hidden away for the sake of the good renown of his
mother, the Church. And there could be no loftier, no more tragical
grandeur than that of this old man of seventy, still so erect and
sovereign, who would neither suffer a slur to be cast upon his spiritual
family, nor consent to his human family being dragged into the inevitable
mire of a sensational murder trial. No, no, there must be none of that,
there must be silence, the eternal silence in which all becomes
forgotten.

At last the doctor bowed with his gentle air of discretion. "Evidently,
of an infectious fever as your Eminence so well says," he replied.

Two big tears then again appeared in Boccanera's eyes.