He was sure that it was a matter of conscience and not of contest with Marina, therefore she must know; he should have realized that!  How had Fra Francesco met her questions?  Had he told her it was a matter beyond the comprehension of women?  Or had he been patient with her difficulties and solved them with terrible positiveness?  Was it he who had brought her these manuals on “Fasts and Penances,” “The Use and Nature of the Interdict,” “The Duty of the Believer,” which completed for her the pictures of horror her faith had already outlined?  Marcantonio had taken in all their dread meaning in rapid glances.  How could she believe those terrible things he had seen in her eyes—­those terrible, terrible things!

Nay, how should she not believe them?  And how implicitly she must have believed them to have endured so much in hope of averting this doom!

“Marina!  Carina!” his heart went out to her in a great wail of pity; a woman—­so tender, so young—­kneeling at night in her chapel, alone with the vision of the horror she was praying to avert; bearing the fasting and the penance and the weakness, all alone, in the hope that God would be merciful; gathering up her failing strength so bravely for that thankless scene in the Senate.  And he, her husband, who had never meant that his love should fail her, could have spared her all this pain by a little comprehension!  Could she ever forgive him?  And would she understand some day?  Might he reason it all out lovingly with her when her strength came back to her—­“For baby’s sake!” that sweet, womanly, natural plea which he had disregarded?

“Signor Santorio,” he moaned, “if I might but reason with her, I might cure her!”

“Nay,” said Santorio, “not yet; the shadow hath not left her eyes.  Let her forget.”

She had been growing stronger, they said, doing quite passively the things they asked of her toward her restoration; she recognized them all, but she expressed neither wish nor emotion, lying chiefly with closed eyes in the cavernous depths of the great invalid chair where they laid her each day, yet responding by some movement if they called her name—­rarely with any words; nothing roused her from that mood of unbroken brooding.

“She will not forget,” the great Santorio said in despair.  “We must try to rouse her.  Let her child be brought.”

The ghost of a smile flitted for an instant about her pale lips and over the shadowy horror in her eyes, as Marcantonio leaned over her with their boy in his arms.  “Carina,” he cried imploringly, “our little one needeth thee!”

She half-opened her arms, but this wraith of the mother, he remembered, frightened the child, who clung sobbing to his father.

Marina fell back with a cry of grief, struggling for the words which came slowly—­her first connected speech since her illness.  “It is the curse!  It parts even mothers and children!”

A strange strength seemed to have come to her; a sudden light gleamed in her eyes; she turned from one to the other, as if seeking some one in authority to answer her question, and fixed upon Santorio’s as the strongest face.