Vittoria, with a low cry, fell upon her knees. Ivan, gone deathly white, stepped forward.
"The Princess Nikitenko is dead?" he asked, dully.
"In the odor of sanctity, my son."
In one brief hour, the shattered illusion of these last weeks of Ivan's Italian existence had crumbled utterly away. As one walks in some unhappy dream, he endured the double ceremonies of funeral and burial. A great crowd was present at the first of these, in the Santo Espirito; and their eyes were glued neither on coffin nor on priest, but every one upon the crape-shrouded figure of a girl, who knelt between Ivan and Madame Nikitenko's heart-broken maid, Marie Latour. Next day the great subject of the salons was this girl's identity, and the reason for the tears which every one declared had flowed so copiously from the purple eyes that might have been stolen from the dead woman who lay upon the high, violet-strewn catafalque, surrounded by a ring of twinkling lights. Yet no one in that eagerly sacrilegious throng had the luck to perceive the most dramatic figure in the church: the shabbily dressed, middle-aged man who, hidden in the shadow of a chapel-pillar, stood watching his daughter, her escort, and the throng of familiar people who had once received him, the outcast, as one of themselves.—Even Gregoriev never suspected this last touch to the finished story. And, had he known it, it could in no way have lightened the weight that lay on his heart when, upon his return to his lonely rooms, he called Piotr to him, in the twilight, and spoke to the man who was afraid to show the joy caused by his master's wearily-spoken command.
"In two days, Piotr, we shall leave for Russia.—Make things ready; and come to me for the necessary money.—Great God! How hideous the world can be!"