able the fever would increase rapidly, although that
thirty-seven point five had a black look.

He asked the invalid if the electric light troubled him. Benedetto
replied that materially it did not trouble him, but that spiritually
it did, because it prevented his seeing the sky, the starry night.
"_Illuminatio mea,_" said he, softly.

The Professor did not understand, and made him repeat the words. Then he
asked him what his light was, and the feeble voice murmured,

_"Nox."_

Mayda was not familiar with the Psalms, with the profound word of
that ancient Hebrew, to whom our little sun seemed dark, the sun which
conceals the higher world. He understood, without understanding. He
remained reverently silent.

Benedetto sought the stars with his eyes. His own conscience was passing
in those stars, which gazed upon him so austerely, knowing he was about
to review--before the threatening hour of death--the whole moral history
of his life, to tell it in words which would be a first judgment,
pronounced in the name of the God of Justice, impelled by the God of
Love; in words that would not be lost, because no movement is lost;
which would appear--who knows how, who knows where, who knows when?--to
the glory of Christ, as the supreme testimony of a spirit to moral
Truth, directed against itself. Thus the silent stars spoke to him,
animated by his own thoughts. And his life was pictured in his mind from
beginning to end, the external, salient outline less strongly marked
than the inner moral substance. He saw all the first part of it
dominated by a religious conception in which egotism prevailed, and so
ordered as to make the love of God and the love of man converge into an
individual well-being, the aim being personal perfection, and reward. He
was grieved that he had thus obeyed in words only the law which places
the love of God before the love of self; and it was a gentle grief,
not because it was easy to find excuses for this error, to impute it
to teachers, but because it was sweet to feel his own minuteness in the
wave of grace which enveloped him. And he felt his own minuteness in
that past, spoiled by imperfect beliefs, influenced by the uprising of
the senses, in the central depression of his life, which had been one
vast tissue of sensuality, of weakness, of contradictions, of lies. He
felt his own minuteness in his life after his conversion, the impulse
and work of an inner Will, which had prevailed against his o