"Perhaps. She might have told you herself; but no, she's afraid of you. When she came here for the Feast--she and that wretched blind man who made her lead him about and then deserted her--no one here recognised her. She seemed so old, she was so ragged, so stupefied by poverty and fears. I hardly knew her myself. The blind man had some horrid nickname for her. But she confided in me--only in me. She told me her whole sad story, and conjured me never to tell you a word about her. She's afraid of you." "Why is she afraid?" "She's afraid you'll put her in prison, because she deserted you. She's afraid of her brothers too; they have the railway _Cantoniera_ at Iglesias." "And her father?" asked Anania, who had never thought of these distant kinsmen. "Her father has been dead many years. He died cursing her; at least that's what she said. She says it was his curse which destroyed her." "I see. She must be mad. But what has she been about all these years? How has she lived? Why didn't she get some work?" He seemed calm, almost indifferent. His questions seemed a matter of curiosity, faint curiosity, which allowed his thought to return to other affairs. Indeed at that moment he was thinking what he must do. If he was sorry for his mother's miserable condition, he was still more distressed by the consequences which would follow from his recovery of her. The widow raised her finger and said solemnly-- "It's all in the hands of God. Son, it's a terrible rod which goads us and pushes us. Didn't my husband intend to work and to die in his bed, praise the Lord! Well, it was just the same with your mother! Of course she would have liked to work and to live honestly. But the rod pushed her on." Anania's face blazed; again he wrung his fingers, suffocated by shame. "It's all over for me!" he thought. "What horror! What wretchedness, what shame! Go on," he said aloud, "tell me all. How did she support herself. I wish to know all--all! Do you understand? I wish to die of shame before----That will do!" he said shaking his head as if to drive from him all cowardly apprehensions. "Tell me." Aunt Grathia looked at him with infinite pity. She would have liked to take him in her arms, to rock him and sing him to sleep with a childish lullaby. Instead she must torture him. But--God's will be done! We are born to suffer, and no one dies of grief! She tried, however, to soften somewhat the bitter cup which God was giving to the poor boy through her hands. "I can't tell you exactly how she supported herself, nor what she did. I just know that after leaving you and in doing that she did the best thing she could, for otherwise you'd never have had a father, nor all that good luck----" "Aunt Grathia, don't drive me mad!" he interrupted.