There, at the last extremity of life, before they were hurried into the great pit outside the walls, lay the plague-stricken. Some unconscious, yet with fearful throes and gasps awaiting their release; some in an agony of pain and death, crying upon God and the Saints. Kneeling by the bedsides were several monks; but at the farther end of the room, bending over a sick man, was a figure in a friar’s gown that made Inglesant stop suddenly, and his heart beat quicker as he caught his companion’s arm. "Who is that friar, Father?" he said, "the one at the end, bending over the bed?" "Ah! that," said the priest, "that is Father Grazia of the Capuchins; a very holy man, and devoted to mortification and good works. He is blind, though he moves about so cleverly. He says that, to within the last few years, his life was passed in every species of sin; and he relates that he was solemnly given over to the vengeance of the blessed Gesu by his mortal enemy, the minion of a Cardinal, and that the Lord has afflicted him with untold sorrows and sufferings to bring him to Himself, and to a life of holy mortification and charity, which he leads unceasingly—night and day. He is but now come in hither, knowing that the sick man by whose bed he is, is dying of the plague in its most fearful form,—a man whom none willingly will approach. Mostly he is in the vilest dens of the city, reeking with pestilence, where to go, to all save him, is certain death. His holiness and the Lord’s will keep him, so that the plague cannot touch him. Ah! he is coming this way." It was true. The friar had suddenly started from his recumbent position, conscious that the man before him was no more. At the same moment, his mind, released from the attention which had riveted it before, seemed to become aware of a presence in the chamber of death which was of the intensest interest. He came down the passage in the centre of the room with an eager unfaltering step, as though able to see, and coming to within a few feet of the two men, he stopped, and looked towards them with an excited glance, as though he saw their faces. Inglesant was embarrassed, and hesitated whether to recognize him or not. At last, pitying the look in the blind man’s face, he said,— "This holy Father is not unknown to me, though I know not that he would desire to meet me again. I am ’the minion of a Cardinal’ of whom you spoke." The friar stretched out his hands before him, with an eager, delighted gesture. "I knew it," he said; "I felt your presence long before you spoke. It signifies little whether I am glad to find you or no. It is part of the Lord’s purpose that we should meet." "This is a strange and sanctified meeting," said the priest, "in the room of death, and by the beds of the dead. Doubtless you have much to say that can only be said to yourselves alone."