He must be alone with his grief, alone with his Maker. It seemed to him he was going mad. It was all too monstrous, too terrible, too unbelievable. How was it possible that one so young, so strong, so beautiful, should die? Friar Geronimo knew not. But his gaze had caused Tristan to shiver as in an ague. He remembered the discourse of Basil and his companion in the galleries of the Emperor's Tomb. Twice was he on the point of warning Hellayne not to attend Basil's banquet. Each time something had intervened. The warning had remained unspoken. Would she have heeded it? He gave a groan of anguish. Hellayne was dead! That was the one all absorbing fact which had taken possession of him, blotting out every other thought, every other consideration. She was dead--dead--dead! The hideous phrase boomed again and again through his distracted mind. Compared with that overwhelming catastrophe what signified the Hour, the Why and the When. She was dead--dead--dead! For hours he sat alone in the solitudes of Mount Aventine, where no prying eyes would witness his grief. And the storm which had arisen and swept the Seven Hilled City with the vehemence of a tropical hurricane seemed but a feeble echo of the tempest that raged within his soul. She was dead--dead--dead. The waves of the Tiber seemed to shout it as they leapt up and dashed their foam against the rocky declivities of the Mount of Cloisters. The wind seemed now to moan it piteously, now to shriek it fiercely, as it scudded by, wrapping its invisible coils about him and seeming intent on tearing him from his resting place. Towards evening he rose and, skirting the heights, descended into the city, dishevelled and bedraggled, yet caring nothing what spectacle he might afford. And presently a grim procession overtook the solitary rambler, and at the sight of the black, cowled and visored forms that advanced in the lurid light of the waxen tapers, Tristan knelt in the street with head bowed till her body had been borne past. No one heeded him. They carried her to the church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, and thither he followed presently, and, in the shadow of one of the pillars of the aisle, he crouched, while the monks chanted the funeral psalms. The singing ended the friars departed, and those who had formed the cortege began to leave the church. In an hour he was alone, alone with the beloved dead, and there on his knees he remained, and no one knew whether, during that horrid hour, he prayed or blasphemed. It may have been toward the third hour of the night when Tristan staggered up, stiff and cramped, from the cold stone. Slowly, in a half-dazed condition, he walked down the aisle and gained the door of the church. He tried to open it, but it resisted his efforts, and he realized it was locked for the night.