the dream, the marriage, the blight, the new hope, the love, Giulio.
The Marquis raised the jar. The green liquor was vitriol. He stood over her, behind, where he did not see her face. The first drop fell upon her head.
"O my God!" she said slowly, "forgive my sins, but I love him with my whole soul."
In startled Rieti there was constant and terrified surmise all the day after the return of the Marquis and his wife. It was one of the breathless, glaring days of midsummer; a day of preternatural silence, when the sultry glare is a spell of terror, and men instinctively talk in whispers. Not a wind sighed; not a bird sang. Only at intervals a solitary cicada stung the ear with its dry, sad tone, There was no dancing at the Osteria; the cattle and the dogs lay listless in the shade; and as the awful heats deepened to noon, the inhabitants were stretched in the shadow of the houses uneasily dozing, or, starting suddenly from hot sleep, glanced with vague apprehension about the sky, as if a fearful tempest were gathering.
Suddenly a sharp, agonized, muffled scream pierced the very heart of that silence, and curdled the blood in the veins of the awe-stricken peasants. They stared at each other speechlessly, sat transfixed as if awaiting another sound; then, after long, breathless minutes, turned their pale faces and whispered stealthily together—not quite sure if that shriek were earthly; but muttering Ave Marias, and making the sign of the cross, their eyes gradually turned, as by tacit conviction, toward the grim palazzo Sangrido, standing sullen in the sun.
Vincenzo, the valet, upon his arrival in Rome, delivered to the Countess Ondella the letter of the Marquis sealed with a black seal, and informing her of the death of her niece, the Marchioness Maddalena. The next evening, Padre Luigi and his brother monks celebrated a funeral mass in the little church of Rieti.
I heard this history after I had left the little town, but I was glad of an opportunity of returning two years afterward. I found the same padrone at the Osteria, and endeavored to learn from him and from the peasants something farther about the Marquis di Sangrido.
