He was a thickset, hard-featured man, and wore the scarlet cockade and scarf of the Masse, with a military sword and buff belt; though otherwise he was attired as a civilian. His gray hairs glistened in the light; he bent his keen, hollow eye on Santugo with a stern careworn aspect, and his sword flashed as he stood on his guard with the air of a perfect fencer. With eyes absolutely blazing with animosity, the visconte was rushing upon him; but faint with loss of blood, he reeled, fell upon the floor, and lay still, without signs of life. His mother uttered a piercing cry: Bianca covered her face, and knelt beside him. I, too, thought him dead: his classic features expressed all that combination of mental and corporeal agony, stiffening into rigidity, which the pencil of Guido Reni has so powerfully portrayed in some of his works. In the confusion which the visconte’s fall occasioned, the bishop’s officials easily possessed themselves of the inanimate Francesca, and bore her away in a close carriage. I was disposed to interfere, but Castelermo grasped my hand. "Signor Claude," said he, "I honour the sentiment which prompts you to defend this unhappy lady; but contending in her favour is to fight against the Church, whose cause is ever the most popular in Italy. The consecrated bride of God, sworn to Heaven at the blessed altar, D’Alfieri cannot make her his either by force or fraud. For the bosom of a lover she has left that of the Church, and back to it she must return; to be chastened and mortified, but I trust not abandoned in the flesh! No, the days when that dread phrase was used have passed away. Had Santugo been more religious and less rash, her vows would have been dispensed with in the usual manner, and she might have been his happy bride; but _now_, alas! after all that has passed, they must part to meet no more. The dungeons of the castle of Cosenza, or the still more horrible vaults of Canne, must close over her, and, perhaps, for ever. Madonna, be merciful to her soul!" The voice of Castelermo faltered, as he deplored the miseries to which the wretched Francesca would be subjected by his bigoted and superstitious countrymen. With these miseries I was then unacquainted, as I knew not the secret horrors those living tombs of Canne were yet to unfold to me, and was ignorant of the cruelties which were too often practised within the walls of continental convents; where a system of domestic persecution had replaced the greater terrors of that mighty engine of ecclesiastical tyranny, the Holy Office, whose punishments for broken vows were founded on those to which the Roman vestals were sentenced by the law of Tarquinius Priscus.