no answer; and again for a
minute or two Annunziata lay silent. But presently, "Have you ever waked
up in the middle of the night, and felt terribly frightened?" she asked.

"Yes, dear, sometimes. I suppose every one has," said Maria Dolores.

"Well, do you know why people feel so frightened when they wake like
that?" pursued the child.

"No," said Maria Dolores.

"I do," said Annunziata. "The middle of the night is the Devil's Noon.
Nobody is awake in the middle of the night except wicked people, like
thieves or roysterers, or people who are suffering. All people who are
good, and who are well and happy, are sound asleep. So it is the time
the Devil likes best, and he and all his evil spirits come to the earth
to enjoy the great pleasure of seeing people wicked or suffering. And
that is why we feel so frightened when we wake. The air all round us is
full of evil spirits, though we can't see them, and they are watching
us, to run and tell the Devil if we do anything wicked or suffer any
pain. But it is foolish of us to feel frightened, because our Guardian
Angels are always there too, and they are a hundred times stronger than
the evil spirits. Angels, you know, are very big, very much bigger than
men. Some of them are as tall as mountains, but even the quite small
ones are as tall as trees."

"This time I really do hear wheels," said Maria Dolores, with an accent
of thanksgiving.

And she rose to meet the doctor.

V

John sat in his room, absorbed in contemplation of a tiny lace-edged
pocket-handkerchief. He spread it out upon his knee, and laughed. He
crumpled it up in his palm, and pressed it to his face, and drank deep
of its faint perfume,--faint, but powerfully provocative of visions and
emotions. He had found it during the night on the floor of the
sick-room, and had captured and borne it away like a treasure. He spread
it out on his knee again, and was again about to laugh at its small size
and gauzy texture, when his eye was caught by something in its corner.
He held it nearer to the window. The thing that had caught his eye was a
cypher surmounted by a crown, embroidered so minutely as almost to call
for a magnifying glass. But without a glass he could see that the cypher
was composed of the initials M and D, and that the crown was not a
coronet, but a closed crown, of the pattern worn by mediatised princes.

"What on earth can be the meaning of this?" he wondered, frowning, and
breathing q