step by step along the course of time. His guide always had been and remained art. Art was best able to wring speech from the silence of death and bid the dust add new forms to the old. Only one thing was still missing, knowledge of the sources of its convincing might, the A B C's of the language in which it expressed its thoughts. Lilly strained herself to follow him. She had never before listened to such language; yet it was not strange. Remnants from of old, from long-forgotten times seemed to cling to the bottom of her soul, which harmonised with what he said. "One day," he continued, "while I was staying in Venice, I went off on a short excursion to Padua. By railroad it's about the same as going from Berlin to Potsdam. I wasn't keen about seeing the art there, because I was still in the honeymoon intoxication of my love for the early Venetians. It was only for the sake of completeness. I got into a little church in which there are frescoes by Giotto. Do you know who he was?" "Certainly--Giotto and Cimabue," she said proudly. "Then I needn't say more. I really had little left in me for him and his people, because, as I said, the quattrocentists had heated my imagination. Now just conceive a Roman amphitheatre completely ruined and overgrown with ivy, nothing but the outer walls still standing, like the walls of a garden. In the enclosure is the little church built of brick, as sober and prosaic as a Prussian Protestant praying barn." Lilly smiled gratefully. A side-thrust at Protestantism was still a personal favour to her. "Services are no longer held there. It has been set aside as a national monument. When I entered I saw nothing at first but a blue radiance from the walls, a sort of modest background, with long rows of pictures on it, the story of Christ told quite simply, the way a preacher speaking to poor people would tell it on Good Friday, provided he is the right preacher for poor people." "But aren't we all poor people in the presence of Christ?" Lilly ventured to interpose. He paused, looked at her with large eyes, then assented eagerly. "Certainly. But not only in the presence of Christ, in the presence also of every great personality, of every great truth. But it isn't easy for us to cultivate that feeling--to make it clear to ourselves that we must be poor when what is given to us ought to enrich us. Religion is best able to inspire us with the feeling, if it finds the correct means of expression. And the Italians did. A poor man spoke to poor men. Therein lay the wealth of Giotto's gift. For what moves us to tears is not his vast competence, it is his incompetence. Do you get what I mean?" "I think I do," said Lilly, her face lighting up. "If a man desires something of us, and can merely stammer and stutter his desire, he affects us more than if he says it in a prepared discourse."