trembling, and she stumbled when she began to walk on.

"Signora, you are tired already. You had better let me go alone."

For the first time she told him a lie.

"I should be afraid to wait here all by myself in the night," she said.
"I couldn't do that."

"Who would come?"

"I should be frightened."

She thought she saw him look at her incredulously in the dark, but was
not sure.

"Be kind to me to-night, Gaspare!" she said.

She felt a sudden passionate need of gentleness, of support, a woman's
need of sympathy.

"Won't you?" she added.

"Signora!" he said.

His voice sounded shocked, she thought; but in a moment, when they came
to an awkward bit of the path, he put his hand under her arm, and very
carefully, almost tenderly, helped her over it. Tears rushed into her
eyes. For such a small thing she was crying! She turned her head so that
Gaspare should not see, and tried to control her emotion. That terrible
question kept on returning to her heart.

"Was I praying for myself when I prayed at the shrine of the Madonna
della Rocca?"

Hermione was gifted, or cursed, with imagination, and as she never made
use of her imaginative faculty in any of the arts, it was, perhaps, too
much at the service of her own life. In happiness it was a beautiful
handmaid, helping her to greater joy, but in unhappy, or in only anxious
moments, it was, as it usually is, a cursed thing. It stood at her elbow,
then, like a demon full of suggestions that were terrible. With an
inventiveness that was diabolic it brought vividly before her scenes to
shake the stoutest courage. It painted the future black. It showed her
the world as a void. And in that void she was as something falling,
falling, yet reaching nothing.

Now it was with her in the ravine, and as she asked questions, terrible
questions, it gave her terrible answers. And it reminded her of other
omens--it told her these facts were really omens--which till now she had
not thought of.

Why had both she and Maurice been led to think and to speak of death
to-day?

Upon the mountain-top the thought of death had come to her when she
looked at the glory of the dawn. She had said to Maurice, "'The mountains
will endure'--but we!" Of course it was a truism, such a thing as she
might say at any time when she was confronted by the profound stability
of nature. Thousands of people had said much the same thing on thousands
of occasions. Yet now the demon at her elbow whisper