prudence pointed to the necessity of separation. Fabio fully agreed with the excellent monk. Valeria was even joyful when her husband reported to her the priest’s counsel; and sent on his way with the cordial good-will of both the young people, loaded with good gifts for the monastery and the poor, Father Lorenzo returned home. Fabio intended to have an explanation with Muzzio immediately after supper; but his strange guest did not return to supper. Then Fabio decided to defer his conversation with Muzzio until the following day; and both the young people retired to rest. IX Valeria soon fell asleep; but Fabio could not sleep. In the stillness of the night, everything he had seen, everything he had felt presented itself more vividly; he put to himself still more insistently questions to which as before he could find no answer. Had Muzzio really become a sorcerer, and had he not already poisoned Valeria? She was ill ... but what was her disease? While he lay, his head in his hand, holding his feverish breath, and given up to painful reflection, the moon rose again upon a cloudless sky; and together with its beams, through the half-transparent window-panes, there began, from the direction of the pavilion--or was it Fabio’s fancy?--to come a breath, like a light, fragrant current ... then an urgent, passionate murmur was heard ... and at that instant he observed that Valeria was beginning faintly to stir. He started, looked; she rose up, slid first one foot, then the other out of the bed, and like one bewitched of the moon, her sightless eyes fixed lifelessly before her, her hands stretched out, she began moving towards the garden! Fabio instantly ran out of the other door of the room, and running quickly round the corner of the house, bolted the door that led into the garden.... He had scarcely time to grasp at the bolt, when he felt some one trying to open the door from the inside, pressing against it ... again and again ... and then there was the sound of piteous passionate moans.... ‘But Muzzio has not come back from the town,’ flashed through Fabio’s head, and he rushed to the pavilion.... What did he see? Coming towards him, along the path dazzlingly lighted up by the moon’s rays, was Muzzio, he too moving like one moonstruck, his hands held out before him, and his eyes open but unseeing.... Fabio ran up to him, but he, not heeding him, moved on, treading evenly, step by step, and his rigid face smiled in the moonlight like the Malay’s. Fabio would have called him by his name ... but at that instant he heard, behind him in the house, the creaking of a window.... He looked round.... Yes, the window of the bedroom was open from top to bottom, and putting one foot over the sill, Valeria stood in the window ... her hands seemed to be seeking Muzzio ... she seemed striving all over towards him....