, bowed a
little, as though he were in church. The cry came again. Then there was
a sort of struggle.

In an instant Gloria was standing up on the bed to her full height. And
the hot, still room rang with a burst of desperate, ear-breaking song,
in majestic, passionate, ascending intervals.

"Calpesta il mio cadavere, ma salva il Trovator!"

The last great, true note died away. For one instant she stood up still,
with outstretched hands, white, motionless. Then the flame in the dark
eyes broke and went out, and Gloria fell down dead.

"Maria Addolorata! Maria Addolorata!" Nanna screamed in deadly terror,
as she heard the transcendent voice that one time, like a voice from the
grave.

She sank down, fainting upon the floor, and the little child rolled from
her slackened arms upon the coarse bricks and lay on its face, moaning
tremulously. No one heeded it.

Stefanone, with instinctive horror of death, turned and went blindly
down the steps, not knowing what he had seen, the death notes still
ringing in his ears.

On the bed, the man lay dumb upon the dead woman. Only the poor little
child seemed to be alive, and clutched feebly at the coarse red bricks,
and moaned and bruised its small face. It bore the slender inheritance
of fatal life, the inheritance of vows broken and of faith outraged, and
with it, perhaps, the implanted seed of a lifelong terror, not
remembered, but felt throughout life, as real and as deadly as an
inheritance of mortal disease. Better, perhaps, if death had taken it,
too, to the lonely grave of the outcast and suicide woman, among the
rocks, out of earshot of humanity. Death makes strange oversights and
leaves strange gleanings for life, when he has reaped his field and
housed his harvest.

They would not give Gloria Christian burial, for it was known throughout
Subiaco that she had poisoned herself, and those were still the old
days, when the Church's rules were the law of the people.

Paul Griggs took the body of the woman he had loved, and loved beyond
death, and he laid her in a deep grave in a hollow of the hillside. Such
words as he had to speak to those who helped him, he spoke quietly, and
none could say that they had seen the still face moved by sorrow. But as
they watched him, a human sort of fear took hold of them, at his great
quiet, and they knew that his grief was beyond anything which could be
shown or understood. It was night, and they filled the grave after he