* * * * * Thou, at first prompting of what I call God, And fools call Nature, didst hear, comprehend, Accept the obligation laid on thee, Mother elect, to save the unborn child. . . . Go past me, And get thy praise--and be not far to seek Presently when I follow if I may!" "Now" (says the sympathetic Other Half-Rome), "begins the tenebrific passage of the tale." As we have seen, Pompilia had tried all other means of escape, even before the great call came to her. Her last appeal had been made to two of Guido's kinsmen, on the wing for Rome like everyone else--Conti being one. Both had refused, but Conti had referred her to Caponsacchi--not evilly like Margherita, but jestingly, flippantly. Nevertheless, that name had come to take a half-fateful sense to her ears . . . and the Other Half-Rome thus images the moment in which she resolved to appeal to him. "If then, all outlets thus secured save one, At last she took to the open, stood and stared With her wan face to see where God might wait-- And there found Caponsacchi wait as well For the precious something at perdition's edge, He only was predestinate to save . . . * * * * * Whatever way in this strange world it was, Pompilia and Caponsacchi met, in fine, She at her window, he i' the street beneath, And understood each other at first look." For suddenly (she tells us) on that morning of Annunciation, she turned on Margherita, ever at her ear, and said, "Tell Caponsacchi he may come!" "How plainly" (says Pompilia)-- "How plainly I perceived hell flash and fade O' the face of her--the doubt that first paled joy, Then final reassurance I indeed Was caught now, never to be free again!" But she cared not; she felt herself strong for everything. "After the Ave Maria, at first dark, I will be standing on the terrace, say!" She knew he would come, and prayed to God all day. At "an intense throe of the dusk" she started up--she "dared to say," in her dying speech, that she was divinely pushed out on the terrace--and there he waited her, with the same silent and solemn face, "at watch to save me." + + + + + He had come, as he defiantly had said, and not the husband met him, but, at the window, with a lamp in her hand, "Our Lady of all the Sorrows." He knelt, but even as he knelt she vanished, only to reappear on the terrace, so close above him that she could almost touch his head if she bent down--"and she did bend, while I stood still as stone, all eye, all ear."