man coming towards them, at whose approach Lanfear instinctively put
himself forward. The man did not look at them, but passed, frowning
darkly, and muttering and gesticulating.

Miss Gerald turned in her litter and followed him with a long gaze. The
peasant girl said gayly in Italian: "He is mad; the earthquake made him
mad," and urged the donkey forward.

Lanfear, in the interest of science, habitually forbade himself the
luxury of anything like foreboding, but now, with the passing of the
madman, he felt distinctively a lift from his spirit. He no longer
experienced the vague dread which had followed him towards Possana, and
made him glad of any delay that kept them from it.

They entered the crooked, narrow street leading abruptly from the open
country without any suburban hesitation into the heart of the ruin,
which kept a vivid image of uninterrupted mediaeval life. There, till
within the actual generation, people had dwelt, winter and summer, as
they had dwelt from the beginning of Christian times, with nothing to
intimate a domestic or civic advance. This street must have been the
main thoroughfare, for stone-paved lanes, still narrower, wound from it
here and there, while it kept a fairly direct course to the little
piazza on a height in the midst of the town. Two churches and a simple
town house partly enclosed it with their seamed and shattered façades.
The dwellings here were more ruinous than on the thoroughfare, and some
were tumbled in heaps. But Lanfear pushed open the door of one of the
churches, and found himself in an interior which, except that it was
roofless, could not have been greatly changed since the people had
flocked into it to pray for safety from the earthquake. The high altar
stood unshaken; around the frieze a succession of stucco cherubs