g out his orders, the getting of all things needed for
the sick man snatched out of death, and all the confusion that rises
when the whole being of a great household must exert its utmost strength
in one direction, to save one life.

Amidst it all, too, the helpless father and mother ran about tearful,
incoherent, wringing their hands, believing no one and yet believing the
impossible, praying, crying, talking, hindering everything in their
supreme parents' right to be in the way and nearest to what they loved
best--hysterical with joy, both of them, at the end, when the physician
said that Gianluca was to live, and was not dead as they had thought
him, and wildly, pathetically, insanely grateful to Veronica.

"I saw that he was dying," she told them simply, when he was out of
danger. "I sent for Don Teodoro, and we were married."

They fell upon her neck, the old man and the prematurely old woman,
kissing her, pressing her in their arms, crying over her, not knowing
what they did.

When he saw that she was telling them, Taquisara went away from them to
his own room and stayed there some time. And Don Teodoro also went home,
and for the second time on that day he bolted his battered door and made
sure that he was alone. But he did not sit at his table playing with
his spectacles, as in the morning. He knelt in a corner, against one of
his rough bookcases, bowed to the ground as though a mountain had come
upon him unawares, and now and then he beat his forehead against the
parchment bindings of his favourite folio Muratori, as certain wild
beasts crouch on their knees and with a swinging of slow despair strike
their heads against the bars of their cage many times in succession.

For Taquisara and Don Teodoro knew, each knowing also that the other
knew, that what Veronica believed to have been done that day had not
been really done, save in the intention, and that what had really been
done must by Church law and right be undone before she could be truly
married to Gianluca della Spina. That is to say, if the thing done had
any value whatsoever before God and man.

It is easy to say that in other lands and under other practices of faith
the four persons concerned in what had happened might have honestly told
themselves that such a marriage was no marriage at all. An unbelieving
Italian, and there are many in the cities, though few in the country,
would have laughed and said that the important point was the legal union