They informed the chief engineer; they informed the minister. Neither of them would listen to the complaint. They were too sensible and too learned to believe in the evil eye. The workmen ought to mind better what they were about. It was their own fault that they met with accidents. And the gravel-cars tipped over; the locomotive exploded. One morning there was a rumor that the engineer was gone. He had disappeared; no one knew what had become of him. Had some one perhaps stabbed him? Oh, no; oh, no! would any one have dared to kill a _jettatore_? But he was really gone; no one ever saw him again. It was a few years later that Donna Micaela began to think of building her railway. And in order to get money for it, she wished to hold a bazaar in the great Franciscan monastery outside Diamante. There was a cloister garden there, surrounded by splendid old pillars. Donna Micaela arranged little booths, little lotteries, and little places of diversion under the arcades. She hung festoons of Venetian lanterns from pillar to pillar. She piled up great kegs of Etna wine around the cloister fountain. While Donna Micaela worked there she often conversed with little Gandolfo, who had been made watchman at the monastery since Fra Felice’s death. One day she made Gandolfo show her the whole monastery. She went through it all from attic to cellar, and when she saw those countless little cells with their grated windows and whitewashed walls and hard wooden seats, she had an idea. She asked Gandolfo to shut her in in one of the cells and to leave her there for the space of five minutes. “Now I am a prisoner,” she said, when she was left alone. She tried the door; she tried the window. She was securely shut in. So that was what it was to be a prisoner! Four empty walls about one, the silence of the grave, and the chill. “Now I can feel as a prisoner feels,” she thought. Then she forgot everything else in the thought that possibly Gandolfo might not come to let her out. He could be called away; he could be taken suddenly ill; he could fall and kill himself in some of the dark passage-ways. Many things could happen to prevent him from coming. No one knew where she was; no one would think of looking for her in that out-of-the-way cell. If she were left there for even an hour she would go mad with terror. She saw before her starvation, slow starvation. She struggled through interminable hours of anguish. Ah, how she would listen for a step; how she would call! She would shake the door; she would scrape the masonry of the walls with her nails; she would bite the grating with her teeth. When they finally found her she would be lying dead on the floor, and they would find everywhere traces of how she had tried to break her way out. Why did not Gandolfo come? Now she must have been there a quarter of an hour, a half-hour. Why did he not come? She was sure that she had been shut in a whole hour when Gandolfo came. Where had he been such a long time?