at? Hush!" or
stopped to gaze at an ancient church, its gables, and pinnacles looming
weird in the moonlight, the cemetery nestling close by; Carlino, again
interrupting, would beg them to talk, converse, gesticulate. "Don't
stare into space," said he. A mutiny broke out in the vanguard, Noemi
being the more petulant. She turned on the _Dyver_, and stamping her
foot, protested that she would go home if this most tiresome novelist in
a muffler did not cease ordering and complaining. Jeanne then whispered:

"Tell me about your monk." "The monk, oh yes," answered Noemi, and
called to Carlino that they would try to satisfy him, but that he must
keep farther off.

From the Quai du Rosaire the swans were no longer visible. Noemi
had watched them in the morning, disporting themselves on the water,
blurring with their stately movements the still reflection of that pile
of houses and cottages that raise their long, big-eared faces out of
the water, like weird, glutted beasts, staring stupidly, some in one
direction, some in another, all herded together by the dominating tower
of the Halles. The moon shone across the houses, throwing shadows on
some glorifying roof-tree and pinnacle, the peaked cap of a Chaldean
magician which crowned a little turret, and above it all, stood out the
sublime octagonal diadem of the mighty tower. But no beam fell on the
dark waters. Nevertheless Jeanne and Noerni leaned for some time against
the parapet, gazing into the gloomy depths; Noemi talked incessantly.
They lingered so long that Carlino had time to fill three or four pages
of his note-book, and to sketch the frieze with which an ambitious
Bruges merchant had adorned his house, even introducing the memorable
date 1716, the year in which the sun, the moon, and the stars had first
beheld it.

The monk, said Noemi, was a Benedictine, by name Don Clemente, belonging
to the monastery of Santa Scolastica at Subiaco. He was an acquaintance
of the Selvas, and Giovanni had first met him near some ruins on the
path leading to Spello, and after having inquired the way, had entered
into conversation with him. He looked little over thirty, and was
of refined manner and bearing. They began to talk of the ruins; the
conversation then drifted on to monasteries and monastic rules, and
finally to religion. The very voice of the Benedictine seemed to breathe
an odour of sanctity; nevertheless it was evident at the same time that
his was a mind that hungered