She startled him by answering irrelevantly:  “You know my mother is dead.  She died a long while ago; I suppose I must have been very little.”

She spoke as if the fact scarcely concerned her, and Lanfear drew a breath of relief in his surprise.  He asked, at another tangent:  “What made you think I was sad yesterday?”

“Oh, I knew, somehow.  I think that I always know when you are sad; I can’t tell you how, but I feel it.”

“Then I must cheer up,” Lanfear said.  “If I could only see you strong and well, Miss Gerald, like this girl—­”

They both looked at the peasant, and she laughed in sympathy with their smiling, and beat the donkey a little for pleasure; it did not mind.

“But you will be—­you will be!  We must hurry on, now, or your father will be getting anxious.”

They pushed forward on the road, which was now level and wider than it had been.  As they drew near the town, whose ruin began more and more to reveal itself in the roofless walls and windowless casements, they saw a man coming towards them, at whose approach Lanfear instinctively put himself forward.  The man did not look at them, but passed, frowning darkly, and muttering and gesticulating.

Miss Gerald turned in her litter and followed him with a long gaze.  The peasant girl said gayly in Italian:  “He is mad; the earthquake made him mad,” and urged the donkey forward.

Lanfear, in the interest of science, habitually forbade himself the luxury of anything like foreboding, but now, with the passing of the madman, he felt distinctively a lift from his spirit.  He no longer experienced the vague dread which had followed him towards Possana, and made him glad of any delay that kept them from it.

They entered the crooked, narrow street leading abruptly from the open country without any suburban hesitation into the heart of the ruin, which kept a vivid image of uninterrupted mediaeval life.  There, till within the actual generation, people had dwelt, winter and summer, as they had dwelt from the beginning of Christian times, with nothing to intimate a domestic or civic advance.  This street must have been the main thoroughfare, for stone-paved lanes, still narrower, wound from it here and there, while it kept a fairly direct course to the little piazza on a height in the midst of the town.  Two churches and a simple town house partly enclosed it with their seamed and shattered facades.  The dwellings here were more ruinous than on the thoroughfare, and some were tumbled in heaps.  But Lanfear pushed open the door of one of the churches, and found himself in an interior which, except that it was roofless, could not have been greatly changed since the people had flocked into it to pray for safety from the earthquake.  The high altar stood unshaken; around the frieze a succession of stucco cherubs perched, under the open sky, in celestial security.

He had learned to look for the unexpected in Miss Gerald, and he could not have said that it was with surprise he now found her as capable of the emotions which the place inspired, as himself.  He made sure of saying:  “The earthquake, you know,” and she responded with compassion: