"God helping me, I _will_ go to Milan," he said. "I will further your cause in Milan itself--even though I leave with you my sword." Still Mastino stood motionless, and slowly Conrad passed through the doors, and down the stairs, through the soldiery that turned their backs--cast out. As the door clashed to behind the Count, Mastino turned passionately and strode into the inner room, not knowing what he did, so great the agony of his helpless fury and despair. A gloomy window gave a view upon the open country. Della Scala strode to it; little he heeded the gloomy couch and the stained floor. He saw only the green plain of Lombardy, and his own diminished tents, lessened by the better half. He struck his hand against the window-frame violently--Visconti had triumphed! This evening had he meant to seize Milan--the evening of this very day; and, behold, now it was all to be done again, the weary, weary waiting, the watching, the planning, the soothing his allies, the making good Carrara's treachery; and meanwhile--Isotta! Della Scala dropped his head into his hands with a cry wrung from his heart. "Isotta! Isotta!" The sunlight fell too on the crumpled parchment on the floor, and Mastino, raising his head, saw it lying there and ground it beneath his heel. "Am I to be forever laughed at and betrayed?" he cried. "Ever served by traitors and leagued with fools? Shall I never learn I trust too much?" He looked around the chamber, and thought, with a bitterness beyond expression, that only a few hours before Visconti had passed through it. Della Scala leaned against the wall; the very sunlight seemed black, the very sky hopeless. Yet his spirit rose against his fate. He drew out and kissed the little locket he wore around his neck, the pearl locket that always hung there. Then suddenly rousing himself and walking blindly forward, opening one door in mistake for another, found himself at the top of two steps, looking down into a chapel. For a moment, his brain reeling and sick, he stepped back, bewildered, doubting what he saw. The place was high and dome-shaped, with plain stone walls, lit by two windows facing each other, but shrouded in dark hangings that admitted only a faint, cold light. The air was damp and vault-like, and the room itself bare of any furniture or adornment save a purple hassock, and two lamps of rusty gold that hung by long, blackened chains from the ceiling. Opposite the entrance hung against the stone wall a purple curtain, and before it a large crucifix, crudely painted. The dim light just struck its dismal coloring, and to Mastino's fevered fancy the dead Christ seemed to twist and writhe along His contorted body. The lamps were long out, and the sense of incense on the air faint. Della Scala entered softly, catching his breath painfully, the terror of religion strong within him. On the purple hassock he knelt, with clasped hands, before the disfigured Christ, his heart rising to his lips in passionate prayer.