Once Anna d'Orobelli said, "This is a haunted garden. Margharita says at night they sometimes hear sounds of singing and dancing although the place is quite empty. It was the ghosts that drove away that preposterous Mrs. Weatherby. I don't mind that. I've never been afraid of ghosts."
They found themselves suddenly at the end of one of the colonnades before a niche let recently into the mouldering wall. It was a niche such as one finds in the gardens of Italy sheltering images of the Virgin, only the image was not that of the interceding Mary but of a figure more ancient. It was the statue that had been dug up out of the cesspool. On the slab of stone beneath it there was an inscription. Father d'Astier had need to read only the first line to know what it was.
"Dans la damnation le feu est la moindre chose; le supplice propre au damné est le progrès infini dans le vice et dans le crime, l'âme s'endurcissant, se dépravant toujours, s'enfoncant nécessairement dans le mal de minute en progression géométrique pendant l'éternité."
He turned away in silence and in silence they walked back to the villa and entering the motor, drove back again at a mad speed down the long hill through Monte Salvatore into Brinoë. They had talked a little but they had said nothing with words. It was the silence which spoke for them.
