Above the bed were three pictures; and near the pillow a crucifix, with a holy water basin and a prayer, printed in letters of gold and framed.  Flowers exhaled their perfume faintly; the candles cast a tender light; all was calm and pure and sacred.  The dreamy thoughts of Juana, but above all Juana herself, had communicated to all things her own peculiar charm; her soul appeared to shine there, like the pearl in its matrix.  Juana, dressed in white, beautiful with naught but her own beauty, laying down her rosary to answer love, might have inspired respect, even in a Montefiore, if the silence, if the night, if Juana herself had not seemed so amorous.  Montefiore stood still, intoxicated with an unknown happiness, possibly that of Satan beholding heaven through a rift of the clouds which form its enclosure.

“As soon as I saw you,” he said in pure Tuscan, and in the modest tone of voice so peculiarly Italian, “I loved you.  My soul and my life are now in you, and in you they will be forever, if you will have it so.”

Juana listened, inhaling from the atmosphere the sound of these words which the accents of love made magnificent.

“Poor child! how have you breathed so long the air of this dismal house without dying of it?  You, made to reign in the world, to inhabit the palace of a prince, to live in the midst of fetes, to feel the joys which love bestows, to see the world at your feet, to efface all other beauty by your own which can have no rival—­you, to live here, solitary, with those two shopkeepers!”

Adroit question!  He wished to know if Juana had a lover.

“True,” she replied.  “But who can have told you my secret thoughts?  For the last few months I have nearly died of sadness.  Yes, I would rather die than stay longer in this house.  Look at that embroidery; there is not a stitch there which I did not set with dreadful thoughts.  How many times I have thought of escaping to fling myself into the sea!  Why?  I don’t know why,—­little childish troubles, but very keen, though they are so silly.  Often I have kissed my mother at night as one would kiss a mother for the last time, saying in my heart:  ‘To-morrow I will kill myself.’  But I do not die.  Suicides go to hell, you know, and I am so afraid of hell that I resign myself to live, to get up in the morning and go to bed at night, and work the same hours, and do the same things.  I am not so weary of it, but I suffer—­And yet, my father and mother adore me.  Oh!  I am bad, I am bad; I say so to my confessor.”

“Do you always live here alone, without amusement, without pleasures?”

“Oh!  I have not always been like this.  Till I was fifteen the festivals of the church, the chants, the music gave me pleasure.  I was happy, feeling myself like the angels without sin and able to communicate every week—­I loved God then.  But for the last three years, from day to day, all things have changed.  First, I wanted flowers here—­and I have them, lovely flowers!  Then I wanted—­but I want nothing now,” she added, after a pause, smiling at Montefiore.  “Have you not said that you would love me always?”