believe that such a thrill was but a lure of Satan's, as my mother
assured me. In deeper matters she might harbour error, as Fra Gervasio's
irony had shown me that he believed. But we went that night into no
great depths.

She spent an hour or so in vague discourse upon the joys of Paradise, in
showing me the folly of jeopardizing them for the sake of the fleeting
vanities of this ephemeral world. She dealt at length upon the love of
God for us, and the love which we should bear to Him, and she read to
me passages from the book of the Blessed Varano and from Scupoli to add
point to her teachings upon the beauty and nobility of a life that
is devoted to God's service--the only service of this world in which
nobility can exist.

And then she added little stories of martyrs who had suffered for the
faith, of the tortures to which they had been subjected, and of the
happiness they had felt in actual suffering, of the joy that their very
torments had brought them, borne up as they were by their faith and the
strength of their love of God.

There was in all this nothing that was new to me, nothing that I did
not freely accept and implicitly believe without pausing to judge or
criticize. And yet, it was shrewd of her to have plied me then as
she did; for thereby, beyond doubt, she checked me upon the point of
self-questioning to which that day's happenings were urging me, and she
brought me once more obediently to heel and caused me to fix my eyes
more firmly than ever beyond the things of this world and upon the
glories of the next which I was to make my goal and aim.

Thus came I back within the toils from which I had been for a moment
tempted to escape; and what is more, my imagination fired to some touch
of ecstasy by those tales of sainted martyrs, I returned willingly to
the pietistic thrall, to be held in it more firmly than ever yet before.

We parted as we always parted, and when I had kissed her cold hand I
went my way to bed. And if I knelt that night to pray that God might
watch over poor errant Falcone, it was to the end that Falcone might be
brought to see the sin and error of his ways and win to the grace of a
happy death when his hour came.

CHAPTER IV. LUISINA

Of the four years that followed little mention need be made in these
pages, save for one incident whose importance is derived entirely from
that which subsequently befell, for at the time it had no meaning for
me. Yet since later it was