'It is I, Bianca--it is I,' the Marquis di Formosa murmured, coming forward.
'Who--who is it?' she asked, shaking with fear, not daring to move.
'I--it is I, Bianca,' he repeated, getting impatient.
She sighed deeply without saying anything, but her breathing was still alarmed. The Marquis had got to his daughter's bed, guided by the faint light of a lamp before a small image of the Virgin.
The girl fell back on the pillows and looked at the ceiling. The Marquis sat down by her bed, and his nervous fingers played with the white fringe of the coverlid.
'Why were you so frightened?' he asked, after a long silence.
'I don't know; it is stronger than I am.'
'When one is in the Lord's grace there is no need for fear,' he remarked sententiously and severely. 'Have you some mortal sin on your conscience?'
'No ... I don't think so, at least,' she said, hesitating.
They kept silence. The Marquis di Formosa looked into the shadows.
'Has the spirit come?' he asked afterwards, in a whispered, mysterious tone.
'Oh, do not speak of that,' she said, sighing again, shutting her eyes, and hiding her face in her hands.
'Has it come?' he insisted; a gambler's cruelty was raging in him now.
'For mercy's sake, if you love me, don't speak of that!' she said, taking his hand and kissing it, so as to move him more.
'Tell me, has it come?' he again repeated implacably.
She, feeling she could not escape that persecution, looked despairingly towards the Virgin, then hid her face in the pillows.
'Tell me, tell me, if it has come!' he cried out, bending over the pillows, as if to breathe his magnetic curiosity into his daughter's face.
'No, it has not,' she said, in a thread of a voice.
'You are lying. The spirit has been here, I feel it.'
'Be good to me; say no more about this,' she said, trembling dreadfully.
'How did you see it? Awake? dozing? sleeping? It was a white figure, was it not, with lowered eyelids, but smiling?... What did it say to you? A very weak voice, wasn't it? Something you alone could have heard?'
'Father, you want to kill me,' she uttered desolately.
These are womanly fears,' said he disdainfully. 'Who ever died through a communication from on high? The meeting of soul and spirit is a spring of life. Bianca Maria, don't be ungrateful, don't be cruel; tell me all.'