"Ismaele?"
"It is I," a voice answered that was not Ismaele's. "It is the prefect. I am coming up-stairs."
The prefect at that hour? What could have happened? Franco went to the kitchen, lighted a candle, and then hastened downstairs.
Five minutes passed and he had not returned to his friends. But meanwhile Ismaele's wife had appeared to say that her husband was feeling very ill, and could not stir. She stood in the square, and spoke to Pedraglio, who was on the terrace. He hastened to summon Franco, and found him on the stairs, coming up with the prefect. "The guide is ill," said he, knowing the priest to be an honest man. "Let us start at once, and not waste any more time." Franco replied that he could not start immediately, and that they must go on ahead. How was this? Why could he not start? No, he could not. He ushered the prefect into the hall, called the lawyer, and tried to persuade both Pedraglio and him to start at once. Something extraordinary had happened, about which he must consult his wife, and he could not say what he might decide to do. His friends protested that they would not forsake him. The jovial Pedraglio, who was in the habit of spending more money than his father approved of, observed that if the worst came to the worst, they would be able to live more economically and more virtuously at Josephstadt or Kufstein than in Turin, and that this would be a consolation to his "governor." "No, no!" exclaimed Franco. "You must go! Prefect, you persuade them!" And he went towards the alcove-room.
"Are you ready to start?" said Luisa, in that voice which seemed to come from a far-away world. "Good-bye."
He came to her side, and stooped to kiss the little stocking she held. "Luisa," he whispered, "the Prefect of Caravina is here." She did not express the slightest astonishment. "Grandmother sent for him an hour or two ago," Franco continued. "She told him she had seen our Maria, shining like an angel."
"Oh, what a lie!" Luisa exclaimed, in a tone full of contempt, but not angrily. "As if it were possible she would go to her and not come to me!"
"Maria has touched her heart," Franco went on. "She begs us to pardon her. She fears she is dying, and entreats me to come to her, to bring her a word of peace from you also."
Franco himself did not believe in the apparition, being profoundly sceptical of everything that was supernatural outside of religion, but he did believe that Maria, in her higher state, had already been able to work a miracle, and touch his grandmother's heart, and the thought caused him indescribable emotion. Luisa remained like ice. She was not even irritated, as Franco had feared she would be, by the proposal to send a friendly message. "Your grandmother fears hell," she observed with her mortal coldness. "Hell does not exist, and so all this amounts to nothing more than a fright. The suffering is not great. Let her bear it, and then die as we all must, and so, 'Amen.'" Franco saw it would be useless to insist. "Then I will go," said he. She was silent.
"I don't think I shall be able to come back this way," Franco added. "I shall have to take to the hills."