What followed?
Why, naturally, the good father had only done what his duty called upon him to do.

He had seen me laid in the vault of my ancestors--the great Romani vault that had never been opened since my father's body was carried to its last resting-place with all the solemn pomp and magnificence of a wealthy nobleman's funeral obsequies.

The more I thought of this the more probable it seemed.

The Romani vault! Its forbidding gloom had terrified me as a lad when I followed my father's coffin to the stone niche assigned to it, and I had turned my eyes away in shuddering pain when I was told to look at the heavy oaken casket hung with tattered velvet and ornamented with tarnished silver, which contained all that was left of my mother, who died young.

I had felt sick and faint and cold, and had only recovered myself when I stood out again in the free air with the blue dome of heaven high above me.