"What is it?" asked Nino, softly.
"Yonder!" whispered Carmela, and her finger pointed through the night to a rock close by the path, where, silent and motionless. One stood.
"Santo Diavolo!" muttered Nino, darkly, to himself, and all his Sicilian jealousy rushed like flame to his head. Hastily bending down, he picked up a sharp heavy stone, and, without turning his eye from the mysterious figure, he added, hastily: "The way is watched. Here is the path that leads up to the chapel. Quick, Carmela, before he sees us."
By this time the rushing wind had driven the heavy clouds high up into the zenith. Suddenly, through a rift, a beam of bright moonlight fell upon the rocks. A wild scream broke from the girl, staring with wide eyes at the motionless figure.
"The saint!" she cried, and held out her arms as if in self-defence against the fearful sight. "The saint! ascended from the sea! Blessed Madonna, protect me!" And, without knowing what she did, as if fleeing from Divine judgment, she rushed up the path to the chapel in breathless haste.
At first Nino was as if spellbound at the unexpected and, even for him, mysteriously terrible vision.
"San Pancrazio!" came brokenly from his lips. But when he heard his beloved's cry, and saw her fleeing through the darkness as if bereft of reason, then the wild blind rage of the Sicilian whose love is threatened seized him.
"Santo Diavolo, accursed saint, you shall pay for this!" he screamed, fiercely, and at the same moment the stone flew, sent by a strong, young hand, toward the Evolino. Nino watched it go, strike; then something solid and heavy rolled, with a dull sound, over the rocks. "May you smash your heathen skull to pieces on the cliffs, old idol!" cried Nino to the tottering saint, and followed his beloved. "Carmela!" he called, without regard to the danger of being heard and discovered. "Carmela, stop! What are you doing?"
But Carmela rushed on like a frightened deer, over stones and roots of trees, whither she knew not, what she sought she could not have told. She fled, in order to flee--fled from the image of the threatening saint, who had appeared in the white shimmering moonlight, as a messenger of God, with the rod of avenging justice in his hand, or perhaps as a guardian angel set in the way of temptation and destruction.
She did not hear Nino's shouts, and she was deaf also to another voice that suddenly called her name. As if all the lost souls from perdition were at her heels, she flew up the cliff's side, and ran under the old olive trees to the chapel.