One night, about one o'clock in the morning, Fabrizio, leaning upon his
window-sill, had slipped his head through the door cut in his screen and
was contemplating the stars and the immense horizon which one enjoyed
from the summit of the Torre Farnese. His eyes, roaming over the country
in the direction of the lower Po and Ferrara, noticed quite by chance an
extremely small but quite brilliant light which seemed to be shining
from the top of a tower. "That light cannot be visible from the plain,"
Fabrizio said to himself, "the bulk of the tower prevents it from being
seen from below; it will be some signal for a distant point." Suddenly
he noticed that this light kept on appearing and disappearing at very
short intervals. "It is some girl speaking to her lover in the next
village." He counted nine flashes in succession. "That is an _I_," he
said, "_I_ being the ninth letter of the alphabet." There followed,
after a pause, fourteen flashes: "That is _N_"; then, after another
pause, a single flash: "It is an _A_; the word is _Ina_."
What were his joy and surprise when the next series of flashes, still
separated by short pauses, made up the following words: