of ours?

Then there came another great sorrow to Pierre which left him stammering,
unable to speak any precise prayer. He thought of the overwhelming
reassertion of Nature's powers which had attended the death of those two
poor children. Was it not awful? To have taken that vow to the Virgin, to
have endured torment throughout life, and to end by plunging into death,
on the loved one's neck, distracted by vain regret and eager for
self-bestowal! The brutal fact of impending separation had sufficed for
Benedetta to realise how she had duped herself, and to revert to the
universal instinct of love. And therein, again once more, was the Church
vanquished; therein again appeared the great god Pan, mating the sexes
and scattering life around! If in the days of the Renascence the Church
did not fall beneath the assault of the Venuses and Hercules then exhumed
from the old soil of Rome, the struggle at all events continued as
bitterly as ever; and at each and every hour new nations, overflowing
with sap, hungering for life, and warring against a religion which was
nothing more than an appetite for death, threatened to sweep away that
old Holy Apostolic Roman and Catholic edifice whose walls were already
tottering on all sides.

And at that moment Pierre felt that the death of that adorable Benedetta
was for him the supreme disaster. He was still looking at her and tears
were scorching his eyes. She was carrying off his chimera. This time
'twas really the end. Rome the Catholic and the Princely was dead, lying
there like marble on that funeral bed. She had been unable to go to the
humble, the suffering ones of the world, and had just expired amidst the
impotent cry of her egotistical passion when it was too late either to
love or to create. Never more would children be born of her, the old
Roman house was henceforth empty, sterile, beyond possibility of
awakening. Pierre whose soul mourned such a splendid dream, was so
grieved at seeing her thus motionless and frigid, that he felt himself
fainting. He feared lest he might fall upon the step beside the bed, and
so struggled to his feet and drew aside.

Then, as he sought refuge in a window recess in order that he might try
to recover self-possession, he was astonished to perceive Victorine
seated there on a bench which the hangings half concealed. She had come
thither by Donna Serafina's orders, and sat watching her two dear
children as she called them, whilst keeping an ey