“Upon the moonlight loveliness, all sunk In one unbroken silence, save the moan From the lone room of death, or the dull sound Of the slow-moving hearse. The homes of men Were now all desolate, and darkness there And solitude and silence took their seat, In the deserted streets: for the dark wing Of a destroying angel had gone by And blasted all existence, and had changed The gay, the busy, and the crowded mart To one cold speechless city of the dead.” After desperate effort, and with strength astounding in a frame so weak, she forced up one of the paving stones that formed the roof of the vault, and dragged herself out. Sitting wearily down for a brief rest, a sudden shower came up and chilled her to the bone. She rose and went to her husband’s house. He, at a second story window, astounded at the ghostly figure in grave clothes that roused him in the dead hour of night, “when ghosts do mostly walk abroad,” and doubtless remembering that his treatment of the living wife had not been such as to recommend him to the favorable notice of her ghost, shut the window with alternate imprecations and invocations, and covered his head with the bedclothes--well-known in all ages to be thoroughly ghost-proof. Ginevra was similarly repulsed from the houses of her father and of various relatives. As a last resort, though exceedingly repugnant to a woman of her delicate feeling, she betook herself, almost chilled to death, to the house of Rondinelli. To his inquiry as to who was there, a weak voice responded, “Do you not know me, Signor Antonio? It is I--Ginevra. Neither my father nor my husband will receive me. Will you, too, turn me away?” Great as was Antonio’s fear of ghosts, the bare possibility that Ginevra was actually there in the flesh was a far stronger consideration; and he hastened to test the reality of his fair visitant. Having her properly cared for, he hastened to the vault, where the displaced stone confirmed her story. A few days later, Antonio boldly applied to the civil authorities to marry the “late Ginevra degli Agolanti,” and backed his application with certificates of the death and burial of the lady! The authorities hearing the facts--and mayhap being romantically disposed--decided that the lady was legally dead, that her relatives, by their own unwilling confession, had persisted in so regarding her; hence, she was no longer bound by any legal tie to the living, father or husband! She was absolutely free! So Antonio and Ginevra were married, and of course, “lived happily ever after.” CHAPTER XX. THE VOLCANO.