“The little brothers are never absent, Agostino.”
“This brother was a big brother,” said I.
“It is not seemly to make jest of holy men,” she reproved me in her chilling voice.
“I had no thought to jest,” I answered soberly. “I should never have remarked this friar but that he gazed upon me with so great an intentness--so great that I was unable to bear it.”
It was her turn to betray emotion. She looked at me full and long--for once--and very searchingly. She, too, had grown paler than was her habit.
“Agostino, what do you tell me?” quoth she, and her voice quivered.
Now here was a deal of pother about a capuchin who had stared at the Madonnino of Anguissola! The matter was out of all proportion to the stir it made, and I conveyed in my next words some notion of that opinion.
But she stared wistfully. “Never think it, Agostino,” she besought me. “You know not what it may import.” And then she turned to Fra Gervasio. “Who was this mendicant?” she asked.
He had by now recovered from his erstwhile confusion. But he was still pale, and I observed that his hand trembled.
“He must have been one of the two little brothers of St. Francis on their way, they said, from Milan to Loreto on a pilgrimage.”
“Not those you told me are resting here until to-morrow?”
From his face I saw that he would have denied it had it lain within his power to utter a deliberate falsehood.
“They are the same,” he answered in a low voice.
She rose. “I must see this friar,” she announced, and never in all my life had I beheld in her such a display of emotion.
“In the morning, then,” said Fra Gervasio. “It is after sunset,” he explained. “They have retired, and their rule...” He left the sentence unfinished, but he had said enough to be understood by her.
She sank back to her chair, folded her hands in her lap and fell into meditation. The faintest of flushes crept into her wax-like cheeks.
“If it should be a sign!” she murmured raptly, and then she turned again to Fra Gervasio. “You heard Agostino say that he could not bear this friar's gaze. You remember, brother, how a pilgrim appeared near San Rufino to the nurse of Saint Francis, and took from her arms the child that he might bless it ere once more he vanished? If this should be a sign such as that!”