'We fell silent again. By this time, I felt I should never have the courage to face an explanation; besides which, I felt that it was less necessary now. Francesca seemed to have come back to me, to understand me, to be once more the sweet kind sister of old. My sorrow drew out her sadness as the moon attracts the waters of the ocean.
'"Listen!" she said.
'The sound of women's voices, singing, floated over to us from the fields, a slow song, full and solemn as a Gregorian chant. Further on, we came in sight of the singers. They were coming away from a field of dried sunflowers; walking in single file like a religious procession, and the sunflowers on their long leafless stalks, their great discs stripped of their halo of petals and their wealth of seed, were like liturgic emblems or monstrances of pale gold.
'My emotion waxed greater. The song spread wide through the evening air. We passed through Rovigliano, where the lamps were beginning to twinkle, and came out again upon the high road. The church bells rang softly behind us. A moist breeze rustled in the trees that cast a faint blue shadow on the white road, and in the air a shadow as liquid as water.
'"Are you not cold?" she asked me, and she ordered the footman to spread a rug over us, and told the coachman to turn homewards.
'In the belfry at Rovigliano, a bell tolled with deep slow strokes as for some solemn rite, and the wave of sound seemed to send a wave of cold through the air. With a simultaneous movement, we drew closer to one another, settling the rug more warmly over our knees, and a shiver ran through us both. The carriage entered the town at a walk.
'"What can that bell be ringing for?" she murmured in a voice that hardly seemed like her own.
'I answered—"I fancy it must be for the Viaticum."
'And in fact, a little further on we saw the priest just entering a door while a clerk held the canopy over him, and two others stood upon the threshold, straight as candelabra, holding up lighted lanterns. A single window of the house was lighted up, the one behind which the dying Christian was awaiting Extreme Unction. Faint shadows flitted across the brightness of that pale yellow square on which was outlined the whole mysterious drama of Death.