dio, be resigned: there is no help for it."

"Silvia, why will you persist in ruining your life and mine? It is a
sin. Say that you are too sick to go to-morrow. Stay in bed all day,
and by night I will have a rope-ladder for you to come down to me. We
can run away and hide somewhere."

"I cannot. We could never hide from Matteo: he would find us out and
kill us both."

"I will go to the Holy Father and tell him all. We could be in Rome
early in the morning if we should walk all night."

"Matteo would hear us: he hears everything. We should never reach
Rome. He would find us wherever we might be hidden. If we were dead
and buried he would pull us out of the ground to stab us. I must go.
I have sinned in having so much intercourse with you. Be resigned,
Claudio. Be a good man, and we shall meet in heaven. The earth is a
terrible place: I am afraid of it. I want to shut myself up in the
convent and be at peace. I fear so much that I tremble all the time.
Say addio."

"I cannot. Will you stay in bed to-morrow, and let me try if I cannot
go to Rome?"

"Say addio, Claudio. I dare not stay here any longer: I hear some one
outside my door. I say addio to you now. I shall not drop the ball
again."

She did not even draw it up again, for the thread caught on a nail in
the wall and broke. And at the same time there was a knock at her
door.

"Silvia, why do you not go to bed?" Matteo called out: "I hear you
up."

"I am going now," she made haste to answer, and in her terror threw
herself on the bed without undressing. She wondered if Matteo could
hear her heart beat through the wall or see how she was shaking.

The next morning at seven o'clock Silvia and her brother took their
seats in the clumsy coach that goes from Monte Compatri to Rome
whenever there are passengers enough to fill it, and after confused
leavetakings from all but the one she wished most to see they set out.
Claudio was invisible. In fact, he had lain on the ground all night
beneath her window, and now, hidden in a tree, was watching the
winding road for an occasional glimpse of the carriage as it bore his
love away.

The peasants of Italy, when they see the Milky Way stretching its
wavering, cloudy path across the sky, shining as if made up of the
footprints of innumerable saints, say that it is the road to
Jerusalem. The road to the New Jerusalem has no such pallid and
spiritual glory: its colors are those of life. No death but that of
martyrd