Diana sat down, bewildered by the sheer beauty of a marvellous and incomparable sight.  Above her head shone the Giotto frescos, the immortal four, in which the noblest legend of Catholicism finds its loveliest expression, as it were the script, itself imperishable, of a dying language, to which mankind will soon have lost the key.

Yet only dying, perhaps, as the tongue of Cicero died—­to give birth to the new languages of Europe.

For in Diana’s heart this new language of the spirit which is the child of the old was already strong, speaking through the vague feelings and emotions which held her spellbound.  What matter the garment of dogma and story?—­the raiment of pleaded fact, which for the modern is no fact?  In Diana, as in hundreds and thousands of her fellows, it had become—­unconsciously—­without the torment and struggle of an older generation—­Poetry and Idea; and all the more invincible thereby.

Above her head, Poverty, gaunt and terrible in her white robe, her skirt torn with brambles, and her poor cheek defaced by the great iron hook which formerly upheld the Sanctuary lamp, married with St. Francis—­Christ himself joining their hands.

So Love and Sorrow pledged each other in the gleaming color of the roof.  Divine Love spoke from the altar, and in the crypt beneath their feet which held the tomb of the Poverello the ashes of Love slept.

The girl’s desolate heart melted within her.  In these weeks of groping, religion had not meant much to her.  It had been like a bird-voice which night silences.  All the energy of her life had gone into endurance.  But now it was as though her soul plunged into the freshness of vast waters, which upheld and sustained—­without effort.  Amid the shadows and phantasms of the church—­between the faces on the walls and the kneeling peasants, both equally significant and alive—­those ghosts of her own heart that moved with her perpetually in the life of memory stood, or knelt, or gazed, with the rest:  the piteous figure of her mother; her father’s gray hair and faltering step; Oliver’s tall youth.  Never would she escape them any more; they were to be the comrades of her life, for Nature had given her no powers of forgetting.  But here, in the shrine of St. Francis, it was as though the worst smart of her anguish dropped from her.  From the dark splendor, the storied beauty of the church, voices of compassion and of peace spoke to her pain; the waves of feeling bore her on, unresisting; she closed her eyes against the lights, holding back the tears.  Life seemed suspended, and suffering ceased.

* * * * *

“So we have tracked you!” whispered a voice in her ear.  She looked up startled.  Three English travellers had quietly made their way to the back of the altar.  Sir James Chide stood beside her; and behind him the substantial form of Mr. Ferrier, with the merry snub-nosed face of Bobbie Forbes smiling over the great man’s shoulder.