While Donna Micaela worked there she often conversed with little Gandolfo, who had been made watchman at the monastery since Fra Felice’s death.
One day she made Gandolfo show her the whole monastery. She went through it all from attic to cellar, and when she saw those countless little cells with their grated windows and whitewashed walls and hard wooden seats, she had an idea.
She asked Gandolfo to shut her in in one of the cells and to leave her there for the space of five minutes.
“Now I am a prisoner,” she said, when she was left alone. She tried the door; she tried the window. She was securely shut in.
So that was what it was to be a prisoner! Four empty walls about one, the silence of the grave, and the chill.
“Now I can feel as a prisoner feels,” she thought.
Then she forgot everything else in the thought that possibly Gandolfo might not come to let her out. He could be called away; he could be taken suddenly ill; he could fall and kill himself in some of the dark passage-ways. Many things could happen to prevent him from coming.
No one knew where she was; no one would think of looking for her in that out-of-the-way cell. If she were left there for even an hour she would go mad with terror.
She saw before her starvation, slow starvation. She struggled through interminable hours of anguish. Ah, how she would listen for a step; how she would call!
She would shake the door; she would scrape the masonry of the walls with her nails; she would bite the grating with her teeth.
When they finally found her she would be lying dead on the floor, and they would find everywhere traces of how she had tried to break her way out.
Why did not Gandolfo come? Now she must have been there a quarter of an hour, a half-hour. Why did he not come?
She was sure that she had been shut in a whole hour when Gandolfo came. Where had he been such a long time?
He had not been long at all. He had only been away five minutes.
“God! God! so that is being a prisoner; that is Gaetano’s life!” She burst into tears when she saw the open sky once more above her.
A while later, as they stood out on an open _loggia_, Gandolfo showed her a couple of windows with shutters and green shades.
Gandolfo told her that a man lived there who never went out except at night,--a man who never spoke to any one.