"Now she only lived in that state of ardent expectancy. The days and weeks and months were but one hour, the hour preceding his last approach to her. Every moment, in her delusion, she expected him to end that hour by coming to her as young as ever, to find her as winsome as before. In consequence, time vanished from her thought. And in vanishing from her thought, time lost its power over her. "Her father died; but Fiammetta still kept her vigil, in appearance the same as on the evening of that tragedy. A new generation of the Foscone grew old in their turn, but Fiammetta's loveliness was still perfect. In her madness there seemed to be a sanity surpassing the sanity of other mortals. For by becoming insensible to time she had attained an earthly immortality, an uncorrupted physical beauty, in which she constantly looked forward to the delight of loving. "So she went on and on----" The tower shook in terror of the gale, and we shook with it, in terror of this revelation. My thoughts turned toward the woman below, who had smiled at us from that aura of physical resplendency. I felt my hair rising, and heard a voice, my own, cry out: "No, no!" "Yes!" Antonio shouted, fixing his hands upon my arms. We were both standing, and our leaping shadows on the wall resembled a combat in which one was struggling to force insanity upon the other. He went on speaking, but his words were drowned in a screaming of vast forces that clutched at the tower as if in fury because the normal processes of nature had been defied. Would those forces attain their revenge? Was the tower about to thunder down upon the Castle of Manzecca, annihilating her and us, the secret and its possessors? For a moment I would have welcomed even that escape from thinking. "Yes," he repeated, releasing my arms and sitting down limply on the bench. "As you anticipate, so it turned out." I was still able to protest: "Admitted that this has happened elsewhere, to a certain degree. In Victorian England there lived a woman whose love-affair was wrecked and whose mind automatically closed itself against everything associated with her tragedy, or subsequent to it. In her madness she, too, protected herself against pain by living in expectation of the lover's return. Because that expectation was restricted to her girlhood, she remained a girl in appearance for over fifty years. Fifty years, that is comprehensible!" "The principle is the same," said Antonio, wearily. "Every mental phenomenon has minor and major examples. But I will tell you the rest.