And it had, too, an odour that is peculiarly full of character, the smell which is never absent from a sacristy and rarely from conventual chambers; a smell difficult to define, faint and yet tenuously pungent, and like no other smell in all the world that I have ever known.

It is a musty odour, an odour of staleness which perhaps an open window and the fresh air of heaven might relieve but could not dissipate; and to this is wed, but so subtly that it would be impossible to say which is predominant, the slight, sickly aroma of wax.
We supped there that night in silence at about the hour that poor Gino Falcone would be taking his departure.

Silence was habitual with us at meal-times, eating being performed--like everything else in that drab household--as a sort of devotional act.

Occasionally the silence would be relieved by readings aloud from some pious work, undertaken at my mother's bidding by one or another of the amanuenses.
But on the night in question there was just silence, broken chiefly by the toothless slobber of the castellan over the soft meats that were especially prepared for him.

And there was something of grimness in that silence; for none--and Fra Gervasio less than any--approved the unchristian thing that out of excess of Christianity my mother had done in driving old Falcone forth.
Myself, I could not eat at all.