e they avoided. It was
lonely and it was sunny. For Italians would have the sun, like the
Lord, to be for ever knocking at the door and for ever shut out. It
must shine upon their outer walls, but not by any means enter their
windows.

As years passed, however, there grew to be one exception in this
regard. Sister Silvia loved not the town with its busy streets, nor
the front windows with their gossiping heads thrust out or in. She had
her own chamber on the Campagna side, and there she sat the livelong
day with knitting or sewing, never going out, except at early
morning to hear mass. There her mother accompanied her--a large,
self-satisfied woman beside a pallid little maiden who never raised
her eyes. Or, if her mother could not go, Matteo stalked along by her
side, and with his black looks made everybody afraid to glance her
way. Nobody liked to encounter the two black eyes of Matteo Guai. It
was understood that the knife in his belt was sharp, and that no
scruple of conscience would stand between him and any vengeance he
might choose to take for any affront he might choose to imagine.

After mass, then, and the little work her mother permitted the girl to
do for health's sake, Silvia sat alone by her window and looked out on
the splendor which her eyes alone could appreciate. There lay the
Campagna rolling and waving for miles and miles around, till the
Sabines, all rose and amethyst, hemmed it in with their exquisite
wall, and the sea curved a gleaming sickle to cut off its flowery
passage, or the nearer mountains stood guard, almost covered by the
green spray it threw up their rocky sides. She sat and stared at Rome
while her busy fingers knit--at the wonderful city where she was one
day to go and be a nun, where the pope lived and kings came to worship
him. In the morning light the Holy City lay in the midst of the
Campagna like her mother's wedding-pearls when dropped in a heap on
their green cushion; and Silvia knelt with her face that way and
prayed for a soul as white, for she was to be the spouse of Christ,
and her purity was all that she could bring Him as a dowry. But when
evening came, and that other airy sea of fine golden mist flowed in
from the west, and made a gorgeous blur of all things, then the city
seemed to float upward from the earth and rise toward heaven all
stirring with the wings of its guardian angels, and Silvia would beg
that the New Jerusalem might not be assumed till she should have