"You must know that a man gets drunk with truth Stagnant inside him. Oh, they've killed her, Sirs! Can I be calm?" But he must be calm: he must show them that soul. "The glory of life, the beauty of the world, The splendour of heaven . . . well, Sirs, does no one move? Do I speak ambiguously? The glory, I say, And the beauty, I say, and splendour, still say I" . . . --for thus he flings defiance at them. Why do they not smile as they smiled at the earlier adultery-trial, when they gave him "the jocular piece of punishment," now that he stands before them "in this sudden smoke from hell"? "Men, for the last time, what do you want with me?" For if they had but seen _then_ what Guido Franceschini was! If they would but have been serious! Pompilia would not now be "Gasping away the latest breath of all, This minute, while I talk--not while you laugh?" How can the end of this deed surprise them? Pompilia and he had shown them what its beginning meant--but all in vain. He, the priest, had left her to "law's watch and ward," and now she is dying--"there and thus she lies!" Do they understand _now_ that he was not unworthy of Christ when he tried to save her? His part is done--all that he had been able to do; he wants no more with earth, except to "show Pompilia who was true"-- "The snow-white soul that angels fear to take Untenderly . . . Sirs, Only seventeen!" Then he begins his story of ". . . Our flight from dusk to clear, Through day and night and day again to night Once more, and to last dreadful dawn of all." Thinking how they sat in silence, both so fearless and so safe, waking but now and then to consciousness of the wonder of it, he cries: "You know this is not love, Sirs--it is faith, The feeling that there's God." By morning they had passed Perugia; Assisi was opposite. He met her look for the first time since they had started. . . . At Foligno he urged her to take a brief rest, but with eyes like a fawn's, "Tired to death in the thicket, when she feels The probing spear o' the huntsman," she had cried, "On, on to Rome, on, on"--and they went on. During the night she had a troubled dream, waving away something with wild arms; and Caponsacchi prayed (thinking "Why, in my life I never prayed before!") that the dream might go, and soon she slept peacefully. . . . When she woke, he answered her first look with the assurance that Rome was within twelve hours; no more of the terrible journey. But she answered that she wished it could last for ever: to be "with no dread"-- "Never to see a face nor hear a voice-- Yours is no voice; you speak when you are dumb; Nor face, I see it in the dark" . . . --such tranquillity was such heaven to her! "This one heart" (she said on her death-bed):