“Ah, yes!” he sighed, “I am very tired!—­very ill!  I do not know what has happened to me—­nor even where I am.  What place is this?”

“It is a place where the dead come!” responded the monk.  “The dead in heart! the dead in soul—­the dead in sin!  They come to bury themselves, lest God should find them and crush them into dust before they have time to say a prayer!  Like Adam and his wife, they hide themselves ’from the presence of the Lord among the trees of the garden.’”

Varillo raised himself on one elbow, and stared at the pale face and smiling mouth of the speaker in fear and wonder.

“‘A place where the dead come!’” he echoed.  “But you are alive—­and so am I!”

“You may be—­I am not,” said the monk quietly.  “I died long ago!  People who are alive say we are men, though we know ourselves to be ghosts merely.  This place is called by the world a Trappist monastery,—­you will go out of it if indeed you are alive—­you must prove that first!  But we shall never come out, because we are dead.  One never comes out of the grave!”

With an effort Varillo tried to control the tremor of his nerves, and to understand and reason out these enigmatical sentences of his companion.  He began to think—­and then to remember,—­and by and by was able to conjure up the picture of himself as he had last been conscious of existence,—­himself standing outside the gates of a great building on the Campagna, and shaking the iron bars to and fro.  It was a Trappist monastery then?—­and he was being taken charge of by the Trappist Order?  This fact might possibly be turned to his account if he were careful.  He lay down once more on his pillow and closed his eyes, and under this pretence of sleep, pondered his position.  What were they saying of him in Rome?  Was Angela buried?  And her great picture?  What had become of it?

“How long have I been here?” he asked suddenly.

The monk gave a curious deprecatory gesture with his hands.

“Since you died!  So long have you been dead!”

Varillo surveyed him with a touch of scorn.

“You talk in parables—­like your Master!” he said with a feeble attempt at a laugh.  “I am not strong enough to understand you!  And if you are a Trappist monk, why do you talk at all?  I thought one of your rules was perpetual silence?”

“Silence?  Yes—­everyone is silent but me!” said the monk—­“I may talk—­because I am only Ambrosio,—­mad Ambrosio!—­something wrong here!” And he touched his forehead.  “A little teasing demon lives always behind my eyes, piercing my brain with darts of fire.  And he obliges me to talk; he makes me say things I should not—­and for all the mischief he works upon me I wear this—­see!”—­And springing up suddenly he threw aside the folds of his garment, and displayed his bare chest, over which a coarse rope was crossed and knotted so tightly, that the blood was oozing from the broken flesh on either side of it.  “For every word I say, I bleed!”