While I watched and compared, however, I did not turn away.  I cannot understand my interest or curiosity, which were very real; I knew that Aurelia was not in this church, but for all that I stood rooted by a pillar at the door and kept my gaze fixed upon the woman in the distant chapel.  She may have continued kneeling there, motionless, for some quarter-hour more; in itself the act of suspense is an absorbing one.  So much was I possessed by it that I forgot all beside it—­that I was a lover, not of this shrouded unknown, that I was penniless and outcast, that I was hungry, ignorant, uncertain, unforgiven.  I think that, in some indefinable way, the spirit of Aurelia may have been about me, pervading this cold church, linking me and that other; I think that Aurelia’s soul may have whispered to mine, “Behold thy duty there.”  I cannot tell.  But this I may say with truth, that when the thin hands at the rail unclasped and one made the cross over the form that knelt so lonely there; when the woman lifted her head, and slowly rising, turned and came up the church; when our looks met, and I found my eyes searching the grave face and sombre eyes of Virginia, that unhappy child for whom I had spent my last gold piece—­I was neither startled nor disappointed, but felt rather that I had known all along that it was she.

I assume that I was in that exalted frame of mind which I have endeavoured to describe.  This young girl’s eyes, fixed upon me, appeared like beacons in that dark place, sullen fires lit at night to warn me that I was still upon sentry duty about her person.  “Money!  Can a soul be saved by money?  The enemy is hungry about the wall,” said the eyes of Virginia, “be steadfast, on the watch.”  Neither of us gave recognition of the other, neither of us spoke; but when she was level with me, I turned and walked by her side to the door.  I held the curtain back for her to pass out; she bowed her head and accepted the service as seriously as a princess.  Together we went down the steps, side by side we crossed the piazza, took the main street, turned to the right under an archway and went down a steep and narrow lane—­all this in perfect silence.  We reached a little piazza, a bay in the lane, raised upon a parapet from the road level.  Here, breaking our long and nervous abstinence, Virginia stopped, saying, “I am tired; let us sit down.”

CHAPTER XIII

HAVING EMPTIED MY POCKET, I OFFER MY HAND, BUT RESERVE MY HEART

We sat down upon the steps of a church—­San Pietro was its name, a very old church.  For a while we were silent; Virginia, it was to be seen, was now timid—­timid to the verge of defiance; I was curious, and curiously excited.

Mastering myself, I asked her in as redoubtable a voice as I could summon, what she did here, in Pistoja.  She then looked at me with her tragic eyes—­grey eyes they were, tinged with black; and looking steadily always, without a trace of fear, she answered, “You know very well why I am here.”