When she rose the world was changed. On either side of the cross stood a tall eucalyptus tree; long tresses of pale fragrant blossom hung among their scimitar-shaped leaves; their cinnamon-coloured trunks, whence rolls of scented bark peeled, were so forked that the branched stems made a comfortable seat; there the tired girl rested in the ruddy glow, silently absorbing the same tranquil pageant of vesper splendour that light-hearted Ermengarde was watching from the hotel garden above. Sea murmurs were faintly audible in the deep stillness, the incense curling bluely from hill-altars was sweet, glorious were the grandly-grouped peaks and mountain masses changing and glowing with life-like motion in the sliding lights, silent, majestic witnesses to the everlasting beauty that underlies and transfuses all things. God was speaking through all that beauty; doubt and fear vanished; in spite of misery, care, and sin, all must be well at last. Lightened at heart, she leant on the low convent wall and looked down the ravine, that was rapidly filling with shadow, and across it at the white village poised on a hill, its slender tower uplifted like a standard under the purple-shadowed mountain peak. Suddenly a harsh high laugh broke upon the charmed stillness, and was followed by strident voices and a confused hurry of footsteps, as the whole rout of pleasure-seekers from the hotel gate clattered round the corner under the convent walls unseen, while a polyglot cackle, playing round the words systems, hotels, Monte, tables, winnings, losings, dinners, poured out in passing crescendo and died gradually away in the distance. But before they were quite out of hearing, as they filed out upon a part of the path visible from the convent wall, the young woman's gaze was startled and arrested by the same lady and attendant youths whose talk had already been overheard from the hotel gardens, and her heart stood still and her colour went at the sight. These two? Was it these two really beyond doubt? Then what she had heard and what had been feared was true, much too true. And for such as they, of what avail to wrestle, to agonize, to beat at the gate of heavenly mercy with fastings and tears and inward silent heart-bleeding? Even now the boy's mother must be praying at home for him. And of what avail? Yet was not yonder vast cathedral reared to the lucid sky telling in superb and solemn beauty of the infinite power and love and pity of the divine poet and artificer of all? And even if that calm majesty had no power to rebuke fretting or silence despair, there was the _spes unica_ shining in the deepening after-glow, a beacon to storm-driven hearts.