An old peasant in a blouse noticed the English ladies, beckoned to them,
and with a kind of gracious authority led them through dark chapels,
till he had placed them in the open space that spread round the flaming
altar, and found them seats on the stone ledge that girdles the walls.
An old woman saying her beads looked up smiling and made room. A baby or
two ran out over the worn marble flags, gazed up at the gilt-and-silver
angels hovering among the candles of the altar, and was there softly
captured--wide-eyed, and laughing in a quiet ecstasy--by its
watchful mother.
Diana sat down, bewildered by the sheer beauty of a marvellous and
incomparable sight. Above her head shone the Giotto frescos, the
immortal four, in which the noblest legend of Catholicism finds its
loveliest expression, as it were the script, itself imperishable, of a
dying language, to which mankind will soon have lost the key.
Yet only dying, perhaps, as the tongue of Cicero died--to give birth to
the new languages of Europe.
For in Diana's heart this new language of the spirit which is the child
of the old was already strong, speaking through the vague feelings and
emotions which held her spellbound.
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