‘Miss Marcia, you strike me as an awfully queer young woman for exactly the same reasons.’
They had come to a curve in the road, and under an over-hanging precipice hollowed out of the rock was a little shrine to the Madonna, and beside it a rough iron cross.
‘Some poor devil has met his fate here,’ said Sybert, and he reined in his horse and leaned from his saddle to make out the blurred inscription traced on the bars. ‘Felice Buconi in the year 1840 at this spot received death at the hand of an assassin. Pray for his soul,’ he translated. ‘Poor fellow! It’s a tragedy in Italy to meet one’s death at the hands of an assassin.’
‘Why more in Italy than in any other place?’
‘Because one dies without receiving the sacrament, and has some trouble about getting into heaven.’
‘Oh!’ she returned. ‘I suppose when Gervasio’s father wished that I might die of an apoplexy he was not only damning me for this world, but for the world to come.’
‘Exactly. An apoplexy in Italy is a comprehensive curse.’
‘I think,’ she commented, ‘that I prefer a religion which doesn’t have a purgatory.’
‘Purgatory,’ he returned, ‘has always struck me as quite superior to anything the Protestants offer. It really gives one something to die for.’
‘I should think, for the matter of that, that heaven direct would give one something to die for.’