Beatrix was still young, but shame and hunger had left on her brow the imprint of those hideous marks that reveal premature ageing. When her pale and mute face timidly begged help from passers-by, when her white and delicate hand opened jerkily to receive their gifts, there were none who did not feel that her life must have been very different at some stage. Those who were the most indifferent to her halted before her with a harsh look that seemed to say: Oh my daughter! How was it you fell from what you were? And yet her own look could no longer reply to them, for it had been a long time now since she had been able to weep. She walked on and on, on and on: her journey seemed as though it would only ever end with her death. One particular day she had been climbing since sun-up, at a bare mountain's back, a rough and rugged path, without a single house in sight to assuage her weariness. All she had eaten were some flavourless roots torn from cracks in the rocks. Her shoes, worn to shreds, had just come away from her bloodied feet. She felt herself faint with fatigue and need when, night having come, she was all of a sudden struck by the appearance of a long line of lights that were indicative of a large building. Towards these lights she made her way with all the strength left to her, but, at the chime of a silvery bell, the sound of which awoke in her heart a strange and vague memory, all the lights went out at once, and all that now remained around her were silence and night. She nevertheless took a few more steps with outstretched arms, and her trembling hands rested on a closed door. She leaned against it for a moment as if to catch her breath and tried to hold onto it so as not to fall. Her debilitated fingers let her down. They gave way under the weight of her body. "Oh holy Mary!" she cried. "Why did I leave you?" And the unhappy Beatrix passed out on the threshold. May the wrath of heaven go easy on the guilty! Nights like this expiate a whole lifetime of sin! The keen coolness of the morning had scarcely begun to bring back to life in her a blurred and painful sense of her own identity, when she perceived that she was not alone. A woman knelt at her side was raising her head carefully, and staring at her with anxious curiosity, waiting for her to come round completely.