But the ecstatic dancer paused not nor rested in her incredible exertions; the excited girls alternately told their beads and then joined in the dance again, while the gray-haired mother, kneeling on the marble pediment of what might have been the fragment of a temple of Bacchus, lifted her hands in prayer to a little shrine of the Madonna, placed there, strangely enough, amidst the relics of paganism.

All of a sudden, however, a horrific blaze, emitted from a huge focus of intolerable light, set the whole heavens aflame.  As from a fresh-created baleful sun, blue and livid and golden-colored lightnings were shivered from it on all sides; dull, however, in comparison to the central ball, which, bursting instantaneously, bathed the sky, earth, and air in one insufferable glare of phosphorescent light.  The deadly blue flame lit up everything with a livid brightness unknown to day.

Walls and faded wall-paintings, limbs of decapitated goddesses gleaming white through the grass and rioting weeds, tottering columns, arches, and vaults, and deserted galleries receding in endless perspective, leaped out lifelike on a background of night and storm.

With piercing shrieks the horrified maidens scattered and fled to the remotest corner of the ruin, where they fell prone on their faces, quivering in a heap.  In a voice strangled by fear, the kneeling mother called for protection on the Virgin and all the saints!  The violin dropped from my nerveless grasp, and at the self-same moment the beautiful dancer, like one struck by a bullet, tottered and dropped to the ground, where she lay without sense or motion.

At that instant a clap of thunder so awful, so heaven-rending, rattled overhead, so roared and banged and clattered among the clouds, that I thought the shadowy ruin, tottering and rocking with the shock, would come crashing about us and bury us under its remains.

But as the thunder rolled on farther and farther, seemingly rebounding from cloud to cloud, I recovered my self-possession, and in mortal fear rushed to the side of the prostrate girl.  I was trembling all over like a coward as I bent down to examine her.  Had the lightning struck her when she fell so abruptly to the ground?  Had life forever forsaken that magnificent form, those divinest limbs?  Would those heavy eyelashes never again be raised from those dazzling eyes?  Breathlessly I moved aside the dusky hair covering her like a pall.  Breathlessly I placed my hand on her heart; a strange shiver and spark quivered through it to my heart.  Yet she was chill as ice and motionless as a stone.  “She is dead, she is dead!” I moaned; and the pang for one I had never known exceeded everything I had felt in my life.

“You mistake, signor,” some one said close beside me; and on looking up I saw the mother intently gazing down on her senseless child.  “My Tolla is not hurt,” she cried:  “she only fell when you left off playing the tarantella; she will arise as soon as you go on.”