"It happened long ago," said Ambrosio. "There was a powerful prince
who thought that to be rich and strong was sufficient to make all
the world his own. But the world belongs to God,--and He does not
always give it over to the robber and spoiler. This prince I tell
you of, had been the lover of a noble lady, but he was false-
hearted; and the false soon grow weary of love! And so, tiring of
her beauty and her goodness, he stabbed her mortally to death, and
thought no one had seen him do the deed. For the only witness to it
was a ray of moonlight falling through the window--just as the
sunlight falls now!--see!" And he pointed to the narrow aperture
which lit the cell, while Florian Varillo, shuddering in spite of
himself, lay motionless. "But when the victim was dead, this very
ray of moonlight turned to the shape of a great angel, and the angel
wore the semblance of our Lord,--and the glory and the wonder of
that vision was as the lightning to slay and utterly destroy! And
from that hour for many years, the murderer was followed by a ray of
light, which never left him; all day he saw it flickering in his
path,--all night it flashed across his bed, driving sleep from his
eyes and rest from his brain!--till at last maddened by remorse he
confessed his crime to a priest, and was taken into a grave like
this, a monastery,--where he died, so they say, penitent.
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