For a mile or more they rode on, then started homeward because of danger signals not to be ignored. There were glimmers of far-away lightning, and they caught the distant roll of thunder. Suddenly a black curtain unfolded over the skies. Before them was a long stretch of open road, at the end of which, where the wood began, they could see the dark shape of the monastery walls; and towards this they were making, their horses lifted to a quicker pace, when they heard an ominous rattling in the upper air. CHAPTER IV A FACT OF LIFE THE warning was a terribly familiar one to the people of Lombardy. They knew it presaged one of the severe storms of hail that plague the region--visitations which the farmer folk dread even more than the sprees of the river. Within the space of ten minutes the growing crops of a whole province had been devastated by one of these onslaughts. The pellets of ice were so big as to fell cattle and kill the herdsmen. Roof tiles of terra cotta were smashed like thin glass. Of such grave import were the bombardments that official means had been devised to ward them off; and now, while the keepers hurried their droves to places of safety, the air was filled with a thunder that did not come from the clouds. On the hilltops and in the sloping fields cannon flashed and roared. With pieces aimed at the blackness above, the peasant gunners fired volley after volley in a scientific endeavor to choke the hailstorm. The picture, as they saw it from their windows, was one to carry old soldiers back to Solferino and Magenta, when the target was not clouds, but Austrians, and the missiles were shot and shell. Mario and Hera set their horses to a gallop and made for the cover of the monastery, as troopers might have dashed across a battle-field. They gained the crumbling portico at the moment that the white bullets began to fall, crackling in the ivy of the wall and dancing on the ground. A few columns of the cloister were standing, and some of the roof remained. Here they left their horses to paw the pavement where monks had walked in the ages long buried. He took her hand and they made their way over a difficult mound of earth and fallen stone to the chapel. Once or twice in the centuries something had been done to save the little church from time’s ravage, though it stood open yet, as to door and window, for the attacks of wind and weather. Rooks had nested there, and the flutter of invisible wings sounded from a dark corner beneath the ceiling. She told him that the chapel was built by the first Riccardo of her line. Standing by a window, they looked out and saw the hailstones beating on the tombs of her ancestors. Hera pointed to a place on the wall where a fresco painting once had been. Fragments of a cornice carved in marble still clung about it; to the eye there was only a patch of blank wall.