‘I must go. I must breathe that air once again before I die--all the agony and all the rapture of it. I must pace those streets again, and feel those stones beneath my feet, though every one were a burning coal that blistered them.’ The air blew in upon him in a rougher gust, both keen and damp, from the mountains of the North and her wild wastes of moorland; from her gray, monotonous sea, ‘the unplumbed, salt, estranging sea,’ and the nerves of the man of the South shuddered under its alien breath. It had awakened him from his dream; he opened his eyes and brought his thoughts once more to reality. He laid his hand on the window to push it to, and as he did so it seemed to him that there was a slight sound outside it. Not a sound whose nature he could have specified--not a sigh, not a groan or a sob, and certainly not a cry or a spoken word, but perhaps something of them all. Nothing deterred by the eeriness of the thing, for he knew not fear, he drew the window more widely open, instead of closing it, and looked forth again. The scene had become even more beautiful than before. Arrested, he still looked, half gazing at the view before him, half listening for that indescribable sound to come again, when his eyes, long-sighted and keen, detected at some little distance from the house, moving hesitatingly and uncertainly along, and emerging from the shadow of the wood into the moonlit grass, a slight, ink-black woman’s figure. It paused suddenly, and perhaps turned. Of that he could not be sure in the uncertain light, but the figure was there. It moved about now quickly, now slowly. Now it looked as if its head were bowed; again, as though its face were raised; and once certainly it stretched its arms out with the gesture of one who wrings hands in dire distress. Signor Giuseppe stood riveted to his place, not in the least afraid, but very curious. Now the figure had disappeared again into the shadow of the wood. He saw it no more, though he strained his eyes to discover it. He stood for some time, and was about to turn away--so dense are our outward senses, so doth this envelope of flesh conceal one spirit from another, though that other may be calling upon us, with agony unspeakable to bear, to help and to comfort. Thus he stood, when, coming from his right hand, from under the shadow of the house, the figure in one second stood immediately in front of him, with the light of the lamp from within falling full upon its face. That face was very pale, very drawn, very much worn with anguish and pain; the eyes which plunged themselves into his were haggard and glazed, and weary beyond description. It was Fulvia’s face; those were Fulvia’s eyes, and Fulvia’s hands they were which were suddenly stretched out towards him; but it was no voice he had ever heard before which, in a hoarse, broken whisper, groaned forth: ‘Father!’