“Seen him?  Why, dear Jocunda, it was only last evening”—­

“True enough.  Well, child, don’t think too much of him.  Men are dreadful creatures,—­in these times especially; they snap up a pretty girl as a fox does a chicken, and no questions asked.”

“I don’t think he looked wicked, Jocunda; he had a proud, sorrowful look.  I don’t know what could make a rich, handsome young man sorrowful; but I feel in my heart that he is not happy.  Mother Theresa says that those who can do nothing but pray may convert princes without knowing it.”

“May be it is so,” said Jocunda, in the same tone in which thrifty professors of religion often assent to the same sort of truths in our days.  “I’ve seen a good deal of that sort of cattle in my day; and one would think, by their actions, that praying souls must be scarce where they came from.”

Agnes abstractedly stooped and began plucking handfuls of lycopodium, which was growing green and feathery on one side of the marble frieze on which she was sitting; in so doing, a fragment of white marble, which had been overgrown in the luxuriant green, appeared to view.  It was that frequent object in the Italian soil,—­a portion of an old Roman tombstone.  Agnes bent over, intent on the mystic “Dis Manibus” in old Roman letters.

“Lord bless the child!  I’ve seen thousands of them,” said Jocunda; “it’s some old heathen’s grave, that’s been in hell these hundred years.”

“In hell?” said Agnes, with a distressful accent.

“Of course,” said Jocunda.  “Where should they be?  Serves ’em right, too; they were a vile old set.”

“Oh, Jocunda, it’s dreadful to think of, that they should have been in hell all this time.”

“And no nearer the end than when they began,” said Jocunda.

Agnes gave a shivering sigh, and, looking up into the golden sky that was pouring such floods of splendor through the orange-trees and jasmines, thought, How could it be that the world could possibly be going on so sweet and fair over such an abyss?

“Oh, Jocunda!” she said, “it does seem too dreadful to believe!  How could they help being heathen,—­being born so,—­and never hearing of the true Church?”

“Sure enough,” said Jocunda, spinning away energetically, “but that’s no business of mine; my business is to save my soul, and that’s what I came here for.  The dear saints know I found it dull enough at first, for I’d been used to jaunting round with my old man and the boys; but what with marketing and preserving, and one thing and another, I get on better now, praise to Saint Agnes!”

The large, dark eyes of Agnes were fixed abstractedly on the old woman as she spoke, slowly dilating, with a sad, mysterious expression, which sometimes came over them.

“Ah! how can the saints themselves be happy?” she said.  “One might be willing to wear sackcloth and sleep on the ground, one might suffer ever so many years and years, if only one might save some of them.”