He got up and strode to the door, and Marcia sat looking after him with frightened eyes. The air seemed charged with his words. She felt herself trembling, and she caught her breath quickly with a half-gasp. She closed her eyes and pictures rose up before her—pictures she did not wish to see. She thought of the hordes of poor people in Castel Vivalanti, of the bony, wrinkled hands that were stretched out for coppers at every turn, of the crowds of children with hungry faces. She thought of the houses that they lived in—wretched little dens, dark and filthy and damp. And it wasn’t their fault, she repeated to herself; it wasn’t their fault. They were honest and frugal, they wanted work; but there was not enough to go around. She sat quite still for several moments, feeling acutely a great many things she had scarcely divined before. Then presently she glanced over her shoulder at the great vats towering out of the darkness behind her. They suddenly presented themselves to her imagination as a symbol, a visible sign of the weight of society bearing down upon the poor, crushing out goodness and happiness and hope. As she watched them with half-fascinated eyes, they seemed to swell and grow until they dominated the whole room with the sense of their oppressiveness. She rose with a little shiver and almost ran to the door. ‘Let’s go!’ she cried. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, looking at her face. ‘Nothing. I want to go. It’s stopped raining.’ He led out the horses and helped her to mount. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked again, ‘Your hand is trembling. Did I say anything to frighten you?’ She shook her head without answering, and when they reached the road she drew a long breath of fresh air and glanced back with a nervous laugh. ‘I had the most horrible feeling in there! I felt as if something were going to reach out from those vats and grab me from behind.’ ‘I think,’ he suggested, ‘that you’d better take some of your aunt’s quinine when you get home.’ ‘Mr. Sybert,’ she said presently, ‘I told you one day that I thought poor people were picturesque, I don’t think so any more.’ ‘I didn’t suppose that you meant it.’ ‘But I did!’ said Marcia. ‘I’ve merely changed my mind.’ She touched Kentucky Lil with her whip and splashed on ahead down the road that led toward the monastery, while Sybert followed with a slightly perplexed frown. The storm had passed as quickly as it had come. Loose, flying clouds still darkened the sky, but the heavy black thunder-clouds were already far to the eastward over the Apennines. In its brief passage, however, the storm had left havoc behind it. The vines in the wayside vineyards were stripped of their leaves, and the bamboo poles they were trained upon broken and bent. Branches torn from the olive trees were strewn over the grass, and in the wheat fields the young grain was bowed almost to the ground. A fierce mountain torrent poured down the side of the road through a gully that an hour before had been dry.