y, taking me with her.

Oftentimes since have I wondered what was the tenour of her prayers that
night. Were they for the rest of the great turbulent soul that was
gone forth in sin, in arms against the Holy Church, excommunicate and
foredoomed to Hell? Or were they of thanksgiving that at last she was
completely mistress of my destinies, her mind at rest, since no longer
need she fear opposition to her wishes concerning me? I do not know, nor
will I do her the possible injustice that I should were I to guess.

CHAPTER II. GINO FALCONE

When I think of my mother now I do not see her as she appeared in any
of the scenes that already I have set down. There is one picture of her
that is burnt as with an acid upon my memory, a picture which the mere
mention of her name, the mere thought of her, never fails to evoke like
a ghost before me. I see her always as she appeared one evening when she
came suddenly and without warning upon Falcone and me in the armoury of
the citadel.

I see her again, a tall, slight, graceful woman, her oval face of the
translucent pallor of wax, framed in a nun-like coif, over which was
thrown a long black veil that fell to her waist and there joined the
black unrelieved draperies that she always wore. This sable garb was no
mere mourning for my father. His death had made as little change in
her apparel as in her general life. It had been ever thus as far as my
memory can travel; always had her raiment been the same, those trailing
funereal draperies. Again I see them, and that pallid face with its
sunken eyes, around which there were great brown patches that seemed to
intensify the depth at which they were set and the sombre lustre of them
on the rare occasions when she raised them; those slim, wax-like hands,
with a chaplet of beads entwined about the left wrist and hanging thence
to a silver crucifix at the end.

She moved almost silently, as a ghost; and where she passed she seemed
to leave a trail of sorrow and sadness in her wake, just as a worldly
woman leaves a trail of perfume.

Thus looked she when she came upon us there that evening, and thus will
she live for ever in my memory, for that was the first time that I knew
rebellion against the yoke she was imposing upon me; the first time that
our wills clashed, hers and mine; and as a consequence, maybe, was it
the first time that I considered her with purpose and defined her to
myself.

The thing befell some three months af