“Ah, sweet Saint Agnes,” she said, “pity me!  I am a poor ignorant young girl, and have been led into grievous sin; but I did not mean to do wrong,—­I have been trying to do right; pray for me, that I may overcome as you did.  Pray our dear Lord to send you with us on this pilgrimage, and save us from all wicked and brutal men who would do us harm.  As the Lord delivered you in sorest straits, keeping soul and body pure as a lily, ah, pray Him to keep me!  I love you dearly,—­watch over me and guide me.”

In those days of the Church, such addresses to the glorified saints had become common among all Christians.  They were not regarded as worship, any more than a similar outpouring of confidence to a beloved and revered friend yet in the body.  Among the hymns of Savonarola is one addressed to Saint Mary Magdalen, whom he regarded with an especial veneration.  The great truth, that God is not the God of the dead, but of the living, that all live to Him, was in those ages with the truly religious a part of spiritual consciousness.  The saints of the Church Triumphant, having become one with Christ as he is one with the Father, were regarded as invested with a portion of his divinity, and as the ministering agency through which his mediatorial government on earth was conducted; and it was thought to be in the power of the sympathetic heart to attract them by the outflow of its affections, so that their presence often overshadowed the walks of daily life with a cloud of healing and protecting sweetness.

If the enthusiasm of devotion in regard to these invisible friends became extravagant and took the language due to God alone, it was no more than the fervid Italian nature was always doing with regard to visible objects of affection.  Love with an Italian always tends to become worship, and some of the language of the poets addressed to earthly loves rises into intensities of expression due only to the One, Sovereign, Eternal Beauty.  One sees even in the writings of Cicero that this passionate adoring kind of love is not confined to modern times.  When he loses the daughter in whom his heart is garnered up, he finds no comfort except in building a temple to her memory,—­a blind outreaching towards the saint-worship of modern times.

Agnes rose from her devotions, and went with downcast eyes, her lips still repeating prayers, to the font of holy water, which was in a dim shadowy corner, where a painted window cast a gold and violet twilight.  Suddenly there was a rustle of garments in the dimness, and a jewelled hand essayed to pass holy water to her on the tip of its finger.  This mark of Christian fraternity, common in those times, Agnes almost mechanically accepted, touching her slender finger to the one extended, and making the sign of the cross, while she raised her eyes to see who stood there.  Gradually the haze cleared from her mind, and she awoke to the consciousness that it was the cavalier!  He moved to come towards her, with a bright smile on his face; but suddenly she became pale as one who has seen a spectre, and, pushing from her with both hands, she said faintly, “Go, go!” and turned and sped up the aisle silently as a sunbeam, joining her grandmother, who was coming from the confessional with a gloomy and sullen brow.