Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: liant leaves here and there the vivid color of the old stone basin shone out, and the worn curb gleamed like glass. Orange, mandarin, laurel and olive-trees, bent with age and ruin, filled the quadrangle, and at the east corner an umbrella pine, perfect to its plumy velvet crest, reached toward the upper arches of the second story. On three sides of the garden stretched the cloisters and their arches, the white and yellow stucco flaking off here and there, the colors vague, in tones as soft as those of Egyptian monuments; and along the west rose the high balcony, its terrace, its railings, its windows and balustrades in tender tones of white and pink. "From it we shall see the port and Naples," Maria Sant' Alcione said, "and to the left are the belfries. Come, Father Faversham! Naples, I think, is always at its best seen from this place of prayer and meditation." She spoke lightly and as if she wished to please her companion with her attitude of mind. "These centuries of prayer must have cast some kind of good into this city of broil, and passion, and beauty." "I am sure," returned the priest, "that no prayer was ever said by human lips that did not bring its immediate answer on the same air." "Oh!" she cried sharply, and stopped. They had walked together toward the terrace. "How can you say such a thing as that? I prayed for my little boy's life as no woman ever prayed before. He died as I prayed." To herself she said: "I have prayed for other things." They had come to the first steps of the flight of stone stairs leading to the terrace. Maria laid one hand on the mossy balustrade and in the other she held her parasol. Faversham replied: "I mean just what I say, Contessa Sant' Alcione. Indeed, I think your prayer for your child was answered then." "Oh, how, Fath...