This street must have been the
main thoroughfare, for stone-paved lanes, still narrower, wound from it
here and there, while it kept a fairly direct course to the little
piazza on a height in the midst of the town. Two churches and a simple
town house partly enclosed it with their seamed and shattered facades.
The dwellings here were more ruinous than on the thoroughfare, and some
were tumbled in heaps. But Lanfear pushed open the door of one of the
churches, and found himself in an interior which, except that it was
roofless, could not have been greatly changed since the people had
flocked into it to pray for safety from the earthquake. The high altar
stood unshaken; around the frieze a succession of stucco cherubs
perched, under the open sky, in celestial security.
He had learned to look for the unexpected in Miss Gerald, and he could
not have said that it was with surprise he now found her as capable of
the emotions which the place inspired, as himself. He made sure of
saying: "The earthquake, you know," and she responded with compassion:
"Oh yes; and perhaps that poor man was here, praying with the rest, when
it happened.
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