And thus died the only earthly thing to which Sister Silvia's heart clung. The mother had been stern, but the daughter was too submissive to need correction. She had never had any will of her own, except to love and obey. Collision between them was therefore impossible, and the daughter felt as a frail plant growing under a shadowing tree might feel if the tree were cut down. She was bare to every wind that blew. She had no companions of her own age--she had no companion of any age, in fact--and she had not been accustomed to think for herself in the smallest thing. She had got bent into a certain shape, however, and her brother and sister felt quite safe on her account. Everybody knew that she was to be a nun of the Perpetual Adoration; that she was soon to go to the convent of Santa Maria Maddalena on the Quirinal in Rome; and that, once entered there, she would never again see a person from outside. The town's-people were accustomed to the wall of silence and seclusion which had already grown up about her, and they did not even seek to salute her when they met her going to and from church in the morning. To these simple citizens, ignorant but reverential, Sister Silvia's lowered eyelids were as inviolate as the pearl gates of the New Jerusalem. Besides, to help their reverence, there were the fierce black eyes and strange reputation of Matteo. So when, a day or two after her mother's death, his sister begged him to accompany her to church in the early morning, and leave her in the care of some decent woman there, Matteo replied that she might go by herself. She set out for the first time alone on what had ever been to her a _via sacra_, and was now become a _via dolorosa_, where her tears dropped as she walked. And going so once, she went again. Pepina, the elder sister, a widow now, had come home to keep house for Matteo, but she was too much taken up with work, the care of her two children and looking out for a second husband to have time to watch Silvia, and after a few weeks the young girl went as unheeded as a matron in her daily walk. At home her life was nearly the same. She mended the clothes from the washing and knit stockings, and sat at her window and looked off over the Campagna toward Rome. One evening she sat there before going to bed and watched the moonlight turn all the earth to black and silver under the purple sky--a black like velvet, so deep and soft was it, and a silver like white fire, clear and splendid, yet beautifully soft. She was feeling desolate, and her tears dropped down, now and then breaking into sobs. It had been pleasant to sit there alone when she knew that her mother was below stairs, strong, healthy and gay. All that life had been as the oil over which her little flame burned. Lacking it, she grew dim, just as the floating wick in her little blue vase before the Madonna grew dim when the oil was gone.