“Signore,” the parroco began, out of breath, “I offer a thousand excuses for venturing to disturb you, but my niece has suddenly fallen ill.  I am going to the village to telephone for a doctor.  My cook is away, for her Sunday afternoon.  Might I pray you to have the extreme kindness to stay with the child till I return?  I don’t know what is the matter, but she fainted, and now is delirious, and, I’m afraid, very ill indeed.”

“Good Heavens!” gasped John, forgetting everything else.  “Of course, of course.”

And he set off hotfoot for the presbytery.

PART SIXTH

I

I would rather not dwell upon the details of Annunziata’s illness.  By the mercy of Providence, she got well in the end; but in the mean time those details were sufficiently painful.  John, for example, found it more than painful to hear her cry out piteously, as she often would in her delirium, that she did not wish to be turned into a monkey; he hung his head and groaned, and cursed the malinspired moment which had given that chimaera birth.  However, he had his compensations.  Maria Dolores, whom he had thought never to see again, he saw every day.  “Let us hope that you and she may never meet again.”  In his despairing heart the words became a refrain.  But an hour later the news of trouble at the presbytery had travelled to the pavilion, and she flew straight to Annunziata’s bedside.  Ever since, (postponing those threatened nuptials at Mischenau), she had shared with John, and the parroco, and Marcella the cook, the labours of nurse.  And though it was arranged that the men, turn and turn about, should watch by night, and the women by day, John, by coming early and leaving late, contrived to make a good part of his vigil and of hers coincident.  And the strange result is that now, looking backwards upon that period of pain and dread, when from minute to minute no one knew what awful change the next minute might bring,—­looking backwards, and seeing again the small bare room, cell-like, with its whitewashed walls, its iron cot, its Crucifix, its narrow window (through which wide miles of valley shone), and then the little white face and the brown curls tossing on the pillow, and the woman of his love sitting near to him, in the intimacy of a common care and common duties,—­the strange result is that John feels a glow in his heart, as at the memory of a period of joy.

“Oh, do not let them turn me into a monkey.  Oh, Holy Mother, I am so afraid.  Oh, do not let them!” Annunziata cried, shuddering, and shrinking deeper into bed, towards the wall.

John hung his head and wrung his hands.  “My God, my God!” he groaned.

“You should not blame yourself,” Maria Dolores said in a low voice, while she bathed the child’s forehead, and fanned her face.  “Your intention was good, you could not foresee what has happened, and it may be for the best, after all,—­it may strengthen her ‘will to live,’ which is the great thing, the doctor says.”