The Land of Cockayne: A Novel

by Matilde Serao

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.'

'I am not.'

'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.