Anania approached the little table on tip-toe. On it he had seen the amulet and the little torn packet, laid on a sheet of glass. He looked at it, almost superstitiously. Then he took it up and opened it. There was in it only a yellow pebble, and some ashes; ashes blackened by time. Ashes! Several times Anania touched those black ashes, which perhaps were the relics of some love token of his mother's; those ashes which long ago she had placed upon his breast that they might feel its deepest throbs. And in that memorable hour of his life, the whole solemn significance of which he knew he did not yet feel, it seemed to him that little heap of Ashes was a symbol of destiny. Yes, all was Ashes; life, death, the human kind; destiny itself which had produced them. And yet in that supreme hour, shadowed by that figure of aged Fate, which seemed Death in waiting,--in the presence of the remains of that most wretched of all the daughters of men, who, after doing and suffering wrong in all its manifestations, had died for another's good,--Anania felt that among the ashes lurks the spark, the seed of the luminous and purifying flame; and Hope returned to him, and he felt that he loved life still. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Ashes, by Grazia Deledda