The farmyard lay hushed and deserted.  The peasants who lived there would soon be afoot; but for the moment Odo had the place to himself.  He tethered his horse to a gate-post and walked across the rough cobble-stones to the chapel.  Its floor was still heaped with farm-tools and dried vegetables, and in the dimness a heavier veil of dust seemed to obscure the painted walls.  Odo advanced, picking his way among broken ploughshares and stacks of maize, till he stood near the old marble altar, with its sea-gods and acanthus volutes.  The place laid its tranquillising hush on him, and he knelt on the step beneath the altar.  Something stirred in him as he knelt there—­a prayer, yet not a prayer—­a reaching out, obscure and inarticulate, toward all that had survived of his early hopes and faiths, a loosening of old founts of pity, a longing to be somehow, somewhere reunited to his old belief in life.

How long he knelt he knew not; but when he looked up the chapel was full of a pale light, and in the first shaft of the sunrise the face of Saint Francis shone out on him...He went forth into the daybreak and rode away toward Piedmont.