A deep bitter sorrow softened her expression. How beautiful she must have been in life; how beautiful still if the dust were taken away from her.

Her eyes shot to me suddenly, accusingly, and then became mild.

"Vain thoughts, my child," she said. "I don't live for looking glasses, as your Master did. I need no velvet or silks to serve my Lord. Ah, Santino, such a newborn thing he is, look at him." She spoke of me. "In centuries gone by I might have penned verses in honor of such beauty, that it should come to us to grace God's sooted fold, a lily in the dark he is, a fairy's child planted by moonlight in a milkmaid's cradle to thrall the world with his girlish gaze and manly whisper."

Her flattery enraged me, but I could not bear in this Hell to lose the sheer beauty of her voice, its deep sweetness. I didn't care what she said. And as I looked at her white face in which many a vein had become a ridge in stone, I knew she was far too old for my impetuous violence. Yet kill, yes, yank head from body, yes, and stab with candles, yes. I thought of these things with clenched teeth, and him, how I would dispatch him for he was not so old, not nearly by half with his olive skin, but these compulsions died like weeds sprung from my mind stung by a northern wind, the deep frozen wind of my will dying inside of me.

Ah, but they were beautiful.

"You will not renounce all beauty," she said kindly, having drunk up my thoughts perhaps, despite all my devices for concealing them. "You will see another variant of beauty-a harsh and variegated beauty- when you take life and see that marvelous corporeal design become a blazing web as you do suck it dry, and dying thoughts do fall on you like wailing veils to dim your eyes and make you but the school of those poor souls you hasten to glory or perdition-yes, beauty. You will see beauty in the stars that can forever be your comfort. And in the earth, yes, the earth itself, you will find a thousand shades of darkness. This will be your beauty. You do but forswear the brash colors of mankind and the defiant light of the rich and the vain."

"I forswear nothing," I said.

She smiled, her face filling with a warm and irresistible warmth, her huge long mat of white hair curling here and there in the ardent flicker of the candles.

She looked to Santino. "How well he understands the things we say," she said. "And yet he seems the naughty boy who mocks all things in ignorance."

"He knows, he knows," the other answered with surprising bitterness. He fed his rats.

He looked at her and me. He seemed to muse and even to hum the old Gregorian chant again.

I heard others in the dark. And far away the drums still beat, but that was unendurable.