Then he gave a great cry.
"Ever, ever night!" he said, stretching out his hands despairingly as to an eternal void.
The duke's eyes seemed to look leagues away over moor and valley and hill, where the blackened ruins of Astura rose beneath a dun smoke against the calm of the morning sky.
A strange tenderness played upon his lips, as if with the extinction of the Frangipani brood peace had entered his soul.
"A man is a mystery to himself," he said.
"But to God?"
"I know no God, save the God, my own soul! Let me live and die,—nothing more! Why curse one's life with a 'to be?'"
Francesco sighed heavily.
"It is a kind of Fate to me!" he said, "inevitable as the setting of the sun, natural as sleep. Not for myself do I fear it alone,—but I should not like to think that I should never see her again."