Soft blackness rose up, choking the bright flames, blotting out the shouting people, the dim outline of the buildings swirling round the feet of Frà Girolamo and mounting to his eyes. He cast himself on his knees and seemed to sink forward on nothingness; his senses broke and forsook him; he flung out his hands and made an effort to hurl off the darkness as if it were a mantle tossed over his head; he felt his knees strike stone, the blackness rent, tore, lifted and disappeared; he found himself lying up the hospital steps; before him the low wall, the cypress tree, the laurel branches; beyond, the darkening pure sky. And beside him the tall stranger staring at him through the holes of his hideous mask. The Friar staggered to his feet. “I have had a vision,” he said under his breath. “Methought you were my guide. Who are you?” The other tore off the mask, snapping the orange ribbons that bound it to his head, and disclosing a superb face framed in clusters of brown curls, flushed with crimson. “I am Piero!” he cried. “I am the Medici! And after the burning of Girolamo Savonarola I shall rule again in Florence!” “Then it was no vision,” answered Frà Girolamo, “but a Devil’s fantasy—” “A fantasy,” said Piero; “but you shall test its truth.” The Friar leant against the wall of the hospital and closed his eyes to shut out the picture of the wicked face and red eyes he had last seen with that same smiling expression casting hate on him from beside the death-bed of Lorenzo the Magnificent. “Lord! Lord!” he cried strongly. “Save me from the snares and delusions of evil!” Now he opened his eyes and saw about him his own cell in St. Mark, and he lay on his bed, and beside him sat his beloved disciple, Frà Domenico, and he shuddered as one waking from a terrible dream. “How got I here from the Piazza?” he asked, sitting up. And they told him that a faintness had come over him as would often happen in the pulpit, and that so insensible he had been brought to the Convent. “Truly,” said Frà Domenico, with love beaming in his eyes, “this was the day of your glory–for all the vanities in Florence were burnt to ashes–yes, even to nothingness was all that wantonness reduced.” Girolamo Savonarola looked at Frà Domenico, then at his own body. “To ashes, to nothingness!” he murmured. “Oh, God, make the spirit strong!” The disciple asked tenderly– “Father, what troubled you?” Frà Girolamo made the sign of the cross and replied with a sweet composure– “Nought–but in the crowd methought that I did see–Piero de’ Medici.” A WOMAN OF THE PEOPLE MADAME LA COMTESSE DU BARRY “Among all the noble and ignoble sufferers by the guillotine there is no record of cowardice on the part of any–save only in the case of Madame du Barry, a woman of the people who had been mistress of France during the most extravagant years of the reign of Louis XV.”–_History of France._