In the front courtyard of the Santissima Annunziata, on this evening, too, about twenty beggars, men and women, were waiting before vespers. Beatrice, who knew them all by name and from time to time visited the children and the sick in their poorhouses near the Port San Niccolo, was in the habit of giving them each a small silver piece in passing. Today she seemed to be a little late. The bells had already tolled, and only traces of their sound still lingered over the towers that rose into the twilight. A commotion developed among the poor also because a new, unknown beggar had stolen into the darkness of the church entry, and they would have driven him away in their jealousy if a young girl in black, almost nunlike clothing had not appeared in the courtyard and, slowed by her kindness, gone from one to the other as a woman attendant held open the purse from which she took her small gifts of alms. The beggars fell to their knees, sobbed, and tried to touch the train of their benefactor’s simple dress for one second with their withered fingers; or else they kissed its trailing hem with their wet, stammering lips.

She had come to the end of the line; and none of the poor people Beatrice knew so well had been missing from it. Yet she became aware in the shadows of the entry of an unfamiliar form in rags, and she recoiled with fright. She became confused. She had known all her poor from the time of her childhood, and making gifts to them had become second nature, an action more or less like dipping one’s finger into the marble basin of holy water that stood at the door of every church. But it had never occurred to her that there might also be beggars she did not know. With what right could she give alms to these also? How could she trust in his poverty, knowing nothing of him? Would it not be outrageously presumptuous to give alms to a stranger? And torn by the conflict of these obscure feelings, the girl went past the new beggar as though she had not noticed him and quickly stepped into the cool, lofty church.