So with the other finest passages of the story, notably the summer day spent by the lovers in a long dusty dreadful pilgrimage to a famous local miracle-working shrine, where they mingle with the multitude of the stricken, the deformed, the hideous, the barely human, and from which they return, disgusted and appalled, to plunge deeper into consoling but too temporary transports; notably also the incident, masterly in every touch, of the little drowned contadino, the whole scene of the small starved dead child on the beach, in all the beauty of light and air and view, with the effusions and vociferations and grimnesses round him, the sights and sounds of the quasi-barbaric life that have the relief of antique rites portrayed on old tombs and urns, that quality and dignity of looming larger which a great feeling on the painter’s part ever gives to small things. With this ampler truth the last page of the book is above all invested, the description of the supreme moment—for some time previous creeping nearer and nearer—at which the delirious protagonist beguiles his vaguely but not fully suspicious companion into coming out with him toward the edge of a dizzy place over the sea, where he suddenly grasps her for her doom and the sense of his awful intention, flashing a light back as into their monstrous past, makes her shriek for her life. She dodges him at the first betrayal, panting and trembling. “Are you crazy?” she cried with wrath in her throat. “Are you crazy?” But as she saw him make for her afresh in silence, as she felt herself seized with still harsher violence and dragged afresh toward her danger, she understood it all in a great sinister flash which blasted her soul with terror. “No, no, Giorgio! Let me go! Let me go! Another minute—listen, listen! Just a minute! I want to say——!” She supplicated, mad with terror, getting herself free and hoping to make him wait, to put him off with pity. “A minute! Listen! I love you! Forgive me! Forgive me!” She stammered incoherent words, desperate, feeling herself overcome, losing her ground, seeing death close. “Murder!” she then yelled in her fury. And she defended herself with her nails, with her teeth, biting like a wild beast. “Murder!” she yelled, feeling herself seized by the hair, felled to the ground on the edge of the precipice, lost. The dog meanwhile barked out at the scuffle. The struggle was short and ferocious, as between implacable enemies who had been nursing to this hour in the depths of their souls an intensity of hate. And they plunged into death locked together.