’Carlo!’ he screamed—’it is Carlo!’ The cry leapt, and fell, and eddied away in a long rosary of echoes. The Fool fumbled for his lips with hers. But who might draw death from that sweet frozen spring! She feared nothing now but that they would come and take him from her—snarled, holding him, when her one sick glint of day stole in to cross her vigil—was in love with utter solitude and blind night. Once, after a little or a long time—it was all one to her—she saw a thread of ghostly whiteness moving on the floor; watched it with basilisk eyes; thought, perhaps, it was his soul, lingering for hers according to its promise. The moving spot came on—stole into the wan, diffused streak of light cast from the grating;—and it was a great rat, with something bound about its neck. She understood on the instant. Long since, her instinctive wit had told her—though she had not cared or been concerned to listen to it—that that sudden voice in the darkness had signified that Carlo was imprisoned somewhere hard by. Well, he had found this means to communicate with her—near a miracle, it might be; but miracles interested her no longer. No harm to let him know at last. _He_ could not rob her of her dead. She coaxed the creature to her; found him tame; read the message; re-fastened on the paper, and, by its glimmer, marked the way of his return. Then she rose, and spoke, and, speaking, choked and died. In the dark all cats are grey, and all women beautiful. But I think the countenance of this one had no need to fear the dawn. *CHAPTER XXVI* Amongst all her costly possessions in the Casa Caprona, there had once been none so loved, so treasured, so often consulted by Beatrice as a certain portrait of the little Parablist of San Zeno, which she had bought straight from the studio of its limner, Messer Antonello da Messina, at that time temporarily sojourning in Milan. This was the artist, pupil of Jan Van Eyck, who had been the first to introduce oil-painting into Italy; and the portrait was executed in the new medium. It was a work perpetrated _con amore_—one of the many in which the exaltation of the moment had sought to express itself in pigments, or marble, or metal. For, indeed, during that short spring of his promise, Bernardo’s flower-face had come to blossom in half the crafts of the town.