The girl sat silent, like one under a spell, eager yet dumb, on the point of utterance. She seemed to struggle with some force which prevented her from speaking. She turned her eyes from one to another, eager, miserable--trying, it seemed, to tell her story--incapable of beginning. At last she surmounted the spell, and burst suddenly into wild tears. “I did not mean it. I saw the church from the window--I thought it was like the Spina. Oh--h! it was not a church at all: it was some dreadful place. They tried to kill me, and then I fled--fled! and I did not know the way----” “What is the Spina?” said Mrs. Eastwood, wondering. “You frighten her, Frederick, making those grimaces. Innocent, no one will be hard upon you. Tell me plainly; what sort of a dreadful place was it? Why did you go?” The girl looked round her at them all, one after another. Why did she go? She did not really understand the question, but it seemed to drive her to that necessity for an answer which sometimes brings the truth from our lips, and sometimes calls up an involuntary fiction which appears like truth to other minds, and sometimes to that of the speaker. “I was--lonely,” she said, after a long pause. Mrs. Eastwood gave a cry of pain. She turned her back upon them all, and walked up and down the room two or three times with an agitation that no one understood. Then she came and stood by Innocent, and put one arm round her. “Oh, Nelly,” she cried, “Nelly, this is our fault!” It would be wrong to say that Nelly was less tender-hearted than her mother, except in so far as youth is always less considerate, less tolerant than experience; but on this occasion she stood unmoved, feeling more indignant than sorry. She, too, had made her essay at sympathy, and she had not got the better of its rejection. She stood by without any particular demonstration, while by degrees some sort of account of the evening was got from her cousin. Innocent told them in broken words all that had happened to her. She shuddered as she described the groans. She was sure she had seen the gleam of the knives, and heard the steps approaching of the men who were going to kill her. This curious Italian version of a very commonplace incident puzzled the family greatly, to whose imaginations knives were quite strange and impossible things. When she had told her tale somehow, she sat, looking at them all, one after the other, with strained eyes, not knowing what they might do to her for the crime she seemed to have committed, without knowing it to be a crime. She did not catch the sense of what they said to each other, though her eyes followed every word, trying to divine it on the lips of the speaker. “I was lonely,” she repeated, with a curious mixture of wistful misery, and the childish cunning of the perception that she had made a successful stroke with these words before.