'But what's the matter?' said Lucy, wondering. 'Has he committed any crime?' And she looked curiously at the figure in the convent window.

'E un prete spretato, Signorina.'

'Spretato?' (unpriested—unfrocked). The word was unfamiliar to her. She frowned over it.

'Scomunicato!' said the carabiniere, with a laugh.

'Excommunicated?' She felt a thrill of pity, mingled with a vague horror.

'Why?—what has he done?'

The carabiniere laughed again. The laugh was odious, but she was already acquainted with that strange instinct of the lower-class Italian which leads him to make mock of calamity. He has passion, but no sentiment; he instinctively hates the pathetic.

'Chi sa, Signorina? He seems a quiet old man. We keep a sharp eye on him; he won't do any harm. He used to give the children confetti, but the mothers have forbidden them to take them. Gianni there'—he pointed to the convent, and Lucy understood that he referred to the contadino—'Gianni went to Don Teodoro, and asked if he should turn him out. But Don Teodoro wouldn't say Yes or No. He pays well, but the village want him to go. They say he will bring them ill-luck with their harvest.'

'And the Padre parroco? Does he not speak to him?'

Antonio laughed.

'When Don Teodoro passes him on the road he doesn't see him—capisce, Signorina? And so with all the other priests. When he comes by they have no eyes. The Bishop sent the word.'

'And everybody here does what the priests tell them?'

Lucy's tone expressed that instinctive resentment which the Puritan feels against a ruling and dominant Catholicism.

Antonio laughed again, but a little stupidly. It was the laugh of a man who knows that it is not worth while even to begin to explain certain matters to a stranger.

'They understand their business—i preti!'—was all he would say. Then—'Ma!—they are rich—the priests! All these last years—so many banks—so many casse—so many societa! That holds the people better than prayers.'

* * * * *

When Lucy turned homewards she found herself watching the light in the far window with an eager attention. A priest in disgrace?—and a foreigner? What could he be hiding here for?—in this remote corner of a district which, as they had been already told at Orvieto, was Catholic, fino al fanatismo?

* * * * *

The morning rose, fresh and glorious, over mountain and forest.

Eleanor watched the streaks of light that penetrated through the wooden sun-shutters grow brighter and brighter on the white-washed wall. She was weary of herself, weary of the night. The old building was full of strange sounds—of murmurs and resonances, of slight creepings and patterings, that tried the nerves. Her room communicated with Lucy's, and their doors were provided with bolts, the newness of which, perhaps, testified to the fears of other summer tenants before them. Nevertheless, Eleanor had been a prey to starts and terrors, and her night had passed in a bitter mingling of moral strife and physical discomfort.

Seven o'clock striking from the village church. She slipped to her feet. Ready to her hand lay one of the soft and elegant wrappers—fresh, not long ago, from Paris—as to which Lucy had often silently wondered how anyone could think it right to spend so much money on such things.

Eleanor, of course, was not conscious of the smallest reproach in the matter. Dainty and costly dress was second nature to her; she never thought about it. But this morning as she first took up the elaborate silken thing, to which pale girls in hot Parisian workrooms had given so much labour of hand and head, and then caught sight of her own face and shoulders in the cracked glass upon the wall, she was seized with certain ghastly perceptions that held her there motionless in the semi-darkness, shivering amid the delicate lace and muslin which enwrapped her. Finished!—for her—all the small feminine joys. Was there one of her dresses that did not in some way speak to her of Manisty?—that had not been secretly planned with a view to tastes and preferences she had come to know hardly less intimately than her own?

She thought of the face of the Orvieto doctor, of certain words that she had stopped on his lips because she was afraid to hear them. A sudden terror of death,—of the desolate, desolate end swept upon her. To die, with this cry of the heart unspent, untold for ever! Unloved, unsatisfied, unrewarded—she whose whole nature gave itself—gave itself perpetually, as a wave breaks upon a barren shore. How can any God send human beings into the world for such a lot? There can be no God. But how is the riddle easier, for thinking Him away?

When at last she rose, it was to make quietly for the door opening on the loggia.

Still there, this radiant marvel of the world!—this pageant of rock and stream and forest, this pomp of shining cloud, this silky shimmer of the wheat, this sparkle of flowers in the grass; while human hearts break, and human lives fail, and the graveyard on the hill yonder packs closer and closer its rows of metal crosses and wreaths!

Suddenly, from a patch of hayfield on the further side of the road, she heard a voice singing. A young man, tall and well made, was mowing in a corner of the field. The swathes fell fast before him: every movement spoke of an assured rejoicing strength. He sang with the sharp stridency which is the rule in Italy—the words clear, the sounds nasal.

Gradually Eleanor made out that the song was the farewell of a maiden to her lover who is going for winter work to the Maremma.

The labourers go to Maremma— Oh! 'tis long till the days of June, And my heart is all in a flutter Alone here, under the moon.

O moon!—all this anguish and sorrow! Thou know'st why I suffer so— Oh! send him me back from Maremma, Where he goes, and I must not go!

The man sang the little song carelessly, commonly, without a thought of the words, interrupting himself every now and then to sharpen his scythe, and then beginning again. To Eleanor it seemed the natural voice of the morning; one more, echo of the cry of universal parting, now for a day, now for a season, now for ever—which fills the world.

* * * * *

She was too restless to enjoy the loggia and the view, too restless to go back to bed. She pushed back the door between her and Lucy, only to see that Lucy was still fast asleep. But there were voices and stops downstairs. The farm-people had been abroad for hours.

She made a preliminary toilette, took her hat, and stole downstairs. As she opened the outer door the children caught sight of her and came crowding round, large-eyed, their fingers in their mouths. She turned towards the chapel and the little cloister that she remembered. The children gave a shout and swooped back into the convent. And when she reached the chapel door, there they were on her skirts again, a big boy brandishing the key.

Eleanor took it and parleyed with them. They were to go away and leave her alone—quite alone. Then when she came back they should have soldi. The children nodded shrewdly, withdrew in a swarm to the corner of the cloister, and watched events.

Eleanor entered. From some high lunette windows the cool early sunlight came creeping and playing into the little whitewashed place. On either hand two cinque-cento frescoes had been rescued from the whitewash. They shone like delicate flowers on the rough, yellowish-white of the walls; on one side a martyrdom of St. Catharine, on the other a Crucifixion. Their pale blues and lilacs, their sharp pure greens and thin crimsons, made subtle harmony with the general lightness and cleanness of the abandoned chapel. A poor little altar with a few tawdry furnishings at the further end, a confessional box falling to pieces with age, and a few chairs—these were all that it contained besides.

Eleanor sank kneeling beside one of the chairs. As she looked round her, physical weakness and the concentration of all thought on one subject and one person made her for the moment the victim of an illusion so strong that it was almost an 'apparition of the living.'

Manisty stood before her, in the rough tweed suit he had worn in November, one hand, holding his hat, upon his hip, his curly head thrown back, his eyes just turning from the picture to meet hers; eyes always eagerly confident, whether their owner pronounced on the affinities of a picture or the fate of a country.

'School of Pinturicchio certainly!—but local work. Same hand—don't you think so?—as in that smaller chapel in the cathedral. Eleanor! you remember?'

She gave a gasp, and hid her face, shaking. Was this haunting of eye and ear to pursue her now henceforward? Was the passage of Manisty's being through the world to be—for her—ineffaceable?—so that earth and air retained the impress of his form and voice, and only her tortured heart and sense were needed to make the phantom live and walk and speak again?

She began to pray—brokenly and desperately, as she had often prayed during the last few weeks. It was a passionate throwing of the will against a fate, cruel, unjust, intolerable; a means not to self-renunciation, but to a self-assertion which was in her like madness, so foreign was it to all the habits of the soul.

'That he should make use of me to the last moment, then fling me to the winds—that I should just make room, and help him to his goal—and then die meekly—out of the way—No! He too shall suffer!—and he shall know that it is Eleanor who exacts it!—Eleanor who bars the way!'

And in the very depths of consciousness there emerged the strange and bitter recognition that from the beginning she had allowed him to hold her cheaply; that she had been content, far, far too content, with what he chose to give; that if she had claimed more, been less delicate, less exquisite in loving, he might have feared and regarded her more.

She heard the chapel door open. But at the same moment she became aware that her face was bathed in tears, and she did not dare to look round. She drew down her veil, and composed herself as she best could.

The person behind, apparently, also knelt down. The tread and movements were those of a heavy man—some countryman, she supposed.

But his neighbourhood was unwelcome, and the chapel ceased to be a place of refuge where feeling might have its way. In a few minutes she rose and turned towards the door.

She gave a little cry. The man kneeling at the back of the chapel rose in astonishment and came towards her.

'Madame!'

'Father Benecke! you here,' said Eleanor, leaning against the wall for support—so weak was she, and so startling was this sudden apparition of the man whom she had last seen on the threshold of the glass passage at Marinata, barely a fortnight before.

'I fear, Madame, that I intrude upon you,' said the old priest, staring at her with embarrassment. 'I will retire.'

'No, no,' said Eleanor, putting out her hand, with some recovery of her normal voice and smile. 'It was only so—surprising; so—unexpected. Who could have thought of finding you here, Father?'

The priest did not reply. They left the chapel together. The knot of waiting children in the cloister, as soon as they saw Eleanor, raised a shout of glee, and began to run towards her. But the moment they perceived her companion, they stopped dead.

Their little faces darkened, stiffened, their black eyes shone with malice. Then suddenly the boys swooped on the pebbles of the courtyard, and with cries of 'Bestia!—bestia!' they flung them at the priest over their shoulders, as they all fled helter-skelter, the brothers dragging off the sisters, the big ones the little ones, out of sight.

'Horrid little imps!' cried Eleanor in indignation. 'What is the matter with them? I promised them some soldi. Did they hit you, Father?'

She paused, arrested by the priest's face.

'They?' he said hoarsely. 'Did you mean the children? Oh! no, they did no harm?'

What had happened to him since they met last at the villa? No doubt he had been in conflict with his superiors and his Church. Was he already suspended?—excommunicate? But he still wore the soutane?

Then panic for herself swept in upon and silenced all else. All was over with their plans. Father Benecke either was, or might at any moment be, in communication with Manisty. Alas, alas!—what ill-luck!

They walked together to the road—Eleanor first imagining, then rejecting one sentence after another. At last she said, a little piteously:

'It is so strange, Father—that you should be here!'

The priest did not answer immediately. He walked with a curiously uncertain gait. Eleanor noticed that his soutane was dusty and torn, and that he was unshaven. The peculiar and touching charm that had once arisen from the contrast between the large-limbed strength which he inherited from a race of Suabian peasants, and an extraordinary delicacy of feature and skin, a childish brightness and sweetness in the eyes, had suffered eclipse. He was dulled and broken. One might have said almost that he had become a mere ungainly, ill-kept old man, red-eyed for lack of sleep, and disorganised by some bitter distress.

'You remember—what I told you and Mr. Manisty, at Marinata?' he said at last, with difficulty.

'Perfectly. You withdrew your letter?'

'I withdrew it. Then I came down here. I have an old friend—a Canon of Orvieto. He told me once of this place.'

Eleanor looked at him with a sudden return of all her natural kindness and compassion.

'I am afraid you have gone through a great deal, Father,' she said, gravely.

The priest stood still. His hand shook upon his stick.

'I must not detain you, Madame,' he said suddenly, with a kind of tremulous formality. 'You will be wishing to return to your apartment I heard that two English ladies were expected—but I never thought—'

'How could you?' said Eleanor hurriedly. 'I am not in any hurry. It is very early still. Will you not tell me more of what has happened to you? You would'—she turned away her head—'you would have told Mr. Manisty?'

'Ah! Mr. Manisty!' said the priest, with a long, startled sigh. 'I trust he is well, Madame?'

Eleanor flushed.

'I believe so. He and Miss Manisty are still at Marinata. Father Benecke!'

'Madame?'

Eleanor turned aside, poking at the stones on the road with her parasol.

'You would do me a kindness if for the present you would not mention my being here to any of your friends in Rome, to—to anybody, in fact. Last autumn I happened to pass by this place, and thought it very beautiful. It was a sudden determination on my part and Miss Foster's—you remember the American lady who was staying with us?—to come here. The villa was getting very hot, and—and there were other reasons. And now we wish to be quite alone for a little while—to be in retirement even from our friends. You will, I am sure, respect our wish?'

She looked up, breathing quickly. All her sudden colour had gone. Her anxiety and discomposure were very evident. The priest bowed.

'I will be discreet, Madame,' he said, with the natural dignity of his calling. 'May I ask you to excuse me? I have to walk into Selvapendente to fetch a letter.'

He took off his flat beaver hat, bowed low and departed, swinging along at a great pace. Eleanor felt herself repulsed. She hurried back to the convent. The children were waiting for her at the door, and when they saw that she was alone they took their soldi, though with a touch of sulkiness.

And the door was opened to her by Lucy.

'Truant!' said the girl reproachfully, throwing her arm round Eleanor. 'As if you ought to go out without your coffee! But it's all ready for you on the loggia. Where have you been? And why!—what's the matter?'

Eleanor told the news as they mounted to their rooms.

'Ah! that was the priest I saw last night!' cried Lucy. 'I was just going to tell you of my adventure. Father Benecke! How very, very strange! And how very tiresome! It's made you look so tired.'

And before she would hear a word more Lucy had put the elder woman into her chair in the deep shade of the loggia, had brought coffee and bread and fruit from the little table she herself had helped Cecco to arrange, and had hovered round till Eleanor had taken at least a cup of coffee and a fraction of roll. Then she brought her own coffee, and sat down on the rug at Eleanor's feet.

'I know what you're thinking about!' she said, looking up with her sweet, sudden smile. 'You want to go—right away!'

'Can we trust him?' said Eleanor, miserably. 'Edward doesn't know where he is,—but he could write of course to Edward at any moment.'

She turned away her face from Lucy. Any mention of Manisty's name dyed it with painful colour—the shame of the suppliant living on the mercy of the conqueror.

'He might,' said Lucy, thinking. 'But if you asked him? No; I don't believe he would. I am sure his soul is beautiful—like his face.'

'His poor face! You don't know how changed he is.'

'Ah! the carabiniere told me last night. He is excommunicated,' said Lucy, under her breath.

And she repeated her conversation with the handsome Antonio. Eleanor capped it with the tale of the children.

'It's his book,' said Lucy, frowning. 'What a tyranny!'

They were both silent. Lucy was thinking of the drive to Nemi, of Manisty's words and looks; Eleanor recalled the priest's last visit to the villa and that secret storm of feeling which had overtaken her as she bade him good-bye.

But when Lucy speculated on what might have happened, Eleanor hardly responded. She fell into a dreamy silence from which it was difficult to rouse her. It was very evident to Lucy that Father Benecke's personal plight interested her but little. Her mind could not give it room. What absorbed her was the feverish question: Were they safe any longer at Torre Amiata, or must they strike camp and go further?



CHAPTER XVII

The day grew very hot, and Eleanor suffered visibly, even though the quality of the air remained throughout pure and fresh, and Lucy in the shelter of the broad loggia felt nothing but a keen physical enjoyment of the glow and blaze that held the outer world.

After their midday meal Lucy was sitting idly on the outer wall of the loggia which commanded the bit of road just outside the convent, when she perceived a figure mounting the hill.

'Father Benecke!' she said to Eleanor. 'What a climb for him in this heat! Did you say he had gone to Selvapendente? Poor old man!—how hot and tired he looks!—and with that heavy parcel too!'

And withdrawing herself a little out of sight she watched the priest. He had just paused in a last patch of shade to take breath after the long ascent. Depositing the bundle he had been carrying on a wayside stone, he took out his large coloured handkerchief and mopped the perspiration from his face with long sighs of exhaustion. Then with his hands on his sides he looked round him. Opposite to him was a little shrine, with the usual rude fresco and enthroned Madonna behind a grating. The priest walked over to it, and knelt down.

In a few minutes he returned and took up his parcel. As he entered the outer gate of the convent, Lucy could see him glancing nervously from side to side. But it was the hour of siesta and of quiet. His tormentors of the morning were all under cover.

The parcel that he carried had partly broken out of its wrappings during the long walk, and Lucy could see that it contained clothes of some kind.

'Poor Father!' she said again to Eleanor. 'Couldn't he have got some boy to carry that for him? How I should like to rest him and give him some coffee? Shall I send Cecco to ask him to come here?'

Eleanor shook her head.

'Better not. He wouldn't come. We shall have to tame him like a bird.'

The hours passed on. At last the western sun began to creep round into the loggia. The empty cells on the eastern side were now cool, but they looked upon the inner cloistered court which was alive with playing children, and all the farm life. Eleanor shrank both from noise and spectators. Yet she grew visibly more tired and restless, and Lucy went out to reconnoitre. She came back recommending a descent into the forest.

So they braved a few yards of sun-scorched road and plunged into a little right-hand track, which led downward through a thick undergrowth of heath and arbutus towards what seemed the cool heart of the woods.

Presently they came to a small gate, and beyond appeared a broad, well-kept path, winding in zig-zags along the forest-covered side of the hill.

'This must be private,' said Eleanor, looking at the gate in some doubt. 'And there you see is the Palazzo Guerrini.'

She pointed. Above them through a gap in the trees showed the great yellow pile on the edge of the plateau, the forest stretching steeply up to it and enveloping it from below.

'There is nothing to stop us,' said Lucy. 'They won't turn us out, if it is theirs. I can't have you go through that sun again.'

And she pressed on, looking for shade and rest.

But soon she stopped, with a little cry, and they both stood looking in astonishment at the strange and lovely thing upon which they had stumbled unawares.

'I know!' cried Lucy. 'The woman at the convent tried to tell me—and I couldn't understand. She said we must see the "Sassetto"—that it was a wonder—and all the strangers thought so. And it is a wonder! And so cool!'

Down from the very brow of the hill, in an age before man was born, the giant force of some primeval convulsion had flung a lava torrent of molten rock to the bed of the Paglia. And there still was the torrent—a rock-stream composed of huge blocks of basalt—flowing in one vast steep fall, a couple of hundred yards wide, through the forest from top to bottom of the hill.

And very grim and stern would that rock-river have been but for Italy, and the powers of the Italian soil. But the forest and its lovely undergrowths, its heaths and creepers, its ferns and periwinkles, its lichen and mosses had thrown themselves on the frozen lava, had decked and softened its wild shapes, had reared oaks and pines amid the clefts of basalt, and planted all the crannies below with lighter, featherier green, till in the dim forest light all that had once been terror had softened into grace, and Nature herself had turned her freak to poetry.

And throughout the 'Sassetto' there reigned a peculiar and delicious coolness—the blended breath of mountain and forest. The smooth path that Eleanor and Lucy had been following wound in and out among the strange rock-masses, bearing the signs of having been made at great cost and difficulty. Soon, also, benches of grey stone began to mark the course of it at frequent intervals.

'We must live here!' cried Lucy in enchantment. 'Let me spread the shawl for you—there!—just in front of that glimpse of the river.'

They had turned a corner of the path. Lucy, whose gaze was fixed upon the blue distance towards Orvieto, heard a hurried word from Eleanor, looked round, and saw Father Benecke just rising from a seat in front.

A shock ran through her. The priest stood hesitating and miserable before them, a hot colour suffusing his hollow cheeks. Lucy saw that he was no longer in clerical dress. He wore a grey alpaca suit, and a hat of fine Leghorn straw with a broad black ribbon. Both ladies almost feared to speak to him.

Then Lucy ran forward, her cheeks too a bright red, her eyes wet and sparkling. 'How do you do, Father Benecke? You won't remember me, but I was just introduced to you that day at luncheon—don't you remember—on the Aventine?'

The priest took her offered hand, and looked at her in astonishment.

'Yes—I remember—you were with Miss Manisty.'

'I wish you had asked me to come with you this morning,' cried the girl suddenly. 'I'd have helped you carry that parcel up the hill. It was too much for you in the heat.'

Her face expressed the sweetest, most passionate sympathy, the indignant homage of youth to old age unjustly wounded and forsaken. Eleanor was no less surprised than Father Benecke. Was this the stiff, the reticent Lucy?

The priest struggled for composure, and smiled as he withdrew his hand.

'You would have found it a long way, Signorina. I tried to get a boy at Selvapendente, but no one would serve me.'

He paused a moment, then resumed speaking with a sort of passionate reluctance, his eyes upon the ground.

'I am a suspended priest—and the Bishop of Orvieto has notified the fact to his clergy. The news was soon known through the whole district. And now it seems the people hate me. They will do nothing for me. Nay, if they could, they would willingly do me an injury.'

The flush had died out of the old cheeks. He stood bareheaded before them, the tonsure showing plainly amid his still thick white locks—the delicate face and hair, like a study in ivory and silver, thrown out against the deep shadows of the Sassetto.

'Father, won't you sit down and tell me about it all?' said Eleanor gently. 'You didn't send me away, you know—the other day—at the villa.'

The priest sighed and hesitated. 'I don't know, Madame, why I should trouble you with my poor story.

'It would not trouble me. Besides, I know so much of it already.'

She pointed to the bench he had just left.

'And I,' said Lucy, 'will go and fetch a book I left in the loggia. Father Benecke, Mrs. Burgoyne is not strong. She has walked more than enough. Will you kindly make her rest while I am gone?'

She fixed upon him her kind beseeching eyes. The sympathy, the homage of the two women enveloped the old man. His brow cleared a little.

She sped down the winding path, aglow with anger and pity. The priest's crushed strength and humiliated age—what a testimony to the power of that tradition for which Mr. Manisty was working—its unmerciful and tyrannous power!

Why such a penalty for a 'mildly Liberal' book?—'a fraction of the truth'? She could hear Manisty's ironic voice on that bygone drive to Nemi. If he saw his friend now, would he still excuse—defend?—

Her thoughts wrestled with him hotly—then withdrew themselves in haste, and fled the field.

* * * * *

Meanwhile Father Benecke's reserve had gradually yielded. He gave Eleanor a long troubled look, and said at last, very simply—

'Madame, you see a man broken hearted—'

He stopped, staring desolately at the ground. Eleanor threw in a few gentle words and phrases, and presently he again mustered courage to speak:

'You remember, Madame, that my letter was sent to the Osservatore Romano after a pledge had been given to me that only the bare fact of my submission, the mere formula that attends the withdrawal of any book that has been placed upon the Index, should be given to the public. Then my letter appeared. And suddenly it all became clear to me. I cannot explain it. It was with me as it was with St. Paul: "Placuit Domino ut revelaret filium suum in me!" My heart rose up and said: "Thou hast betrayed the truth"—"Tradidisti Sanctum et Justum!" After I left you that day I wrote withdrawing my letter and my submission. And I sent a copy to one of the Liberal papers. Then my heart smote me. One of the Cardinals of the Holy Office had treated me with much kindness. I wrote to him—I tried to explain what I had done. I wrote to several other persons at the Vatican, complaining of the manner in which I had been dealt with. No answer—not one. All were silent—as though I were already a dead man. Then I tried to see one or two of my old friends. But no one would receive me; one and all turned me from their doors. So then I left Rome. But I could not make up my mind to go home till I knew the worst. You understand, Madame, that I have been a Professor of Theology; that my Faculty can remove me—that my Faculty obeys the Bishops, and the Bishops obey the Holy See. I remembered this place—I left my address in Rome—and I came down here to wait. Ah! it was not long!'

He drew himself up, smiling bitterly.

'Two days after I arrived here I received two letters simultaneously—one from my Bishop, the other from the Council of my Faculty—suspending me both from my priestly and my academical functions. By the next post arrived a communication from the Bishop of this diocese, forbidding me the Sacraments.'

He paused. The mere recital of his case had brought him again into the bewilderment of that mental anguish he had gone through. Eleanor made a murmur of sympathy. He faced her with a sudden ardour.

'I had expected it, Madame; but when it came I was stunned—I was bowed to the earth. A few days later, I received an anonymous letter—from Orvieto, I think—reminding me that a priest suspended a divinis has no right to the soutane. "Let the traitor," it said, "give up the uniform he has disgraced—let him at least have the decency to do that." In my trouble I had not thought of it. So I wrote to a friend in Rome to send me clothes.'

Eleanor's eyes filled with tears. She thought of the old man staggering alone up the dusty hill under his unwelcome burden.

He himself was looking down at his new clothes in a kind of confusion. Suddenly he said under his breath, 'And for what?—because I said what every educated man in Europe knows to be true?'

'Father,' said Eleanor, longing to express some poor word of comfort and respect, 'you have suffered greatly—you will suffer—but it is not for yourself.'

He shook his head.

'Madame, you see a man dying of hunger and thirst! He cannot cheat himself with fine words. He starves!'

She stared at him, startled—partly understanding.

'For forty-two years,' he said, in a low, pathetic voice, 'have I received my Lord—day after day—without a break. And now "they have taken Him away—and I know not where they have laid Him!"'

Nothing could be more desolate than tone and look. Eleanor understood. She had seen this hunger before. She remembered a convent in Rome where on Good Fridays some of the nuns were often ill with restlessness and longing, because for twenty-four hours the Sacrament was not upon the altar.

Under the protection of her reverent and pitying silence he gradually recovered himself. With great delicacy, with fine and chosen words, she began to try and comfort him, dwelling on his comradeship with all the martyrs of the world, on the help and support that would certainly gather round him, on the new friends that would replace the old. And as she talked there grew up in her mind an envy of him so passionate, so intense, that she could have thrown herself at his feet there and then and opened her own wretched heart to him.

He, tortured by the martyrdom of thought, by the loss of Christian fellowship!—She, scorched and consumed by a passion that was perfectly ready to feed itself on the pain and injury of the beloved, or the innocent, as soon as its own selfish satisfaction was denied it! There was a moment when she felt herself unworthy to breathe the same air with him.

She stared at him, frowning and pale, her hand clasping her breast, lest he should hear the beating of her heart.

* * * * *

Then the hand dropped. The inner tumult passed. And at the same moment the sound of steps was heard approaching.

Round the further corner of the path came two ladies, descending towards them. They were both dressed in deep mourning. The first was an old woman, powerfully and substantially built. Her grey hair, raised in a sort of toupe under her plain black bonnet, framed a broad and noticeable brow, black eyes, and other features that were both benevolent and strong. She was very pale, and her face expressed a haunting and prevailing sorrow. Eleanor noticed that she was walking alone, some distance ahead of her companion, and that she had gathered up her black skirts in an ungloved hand, with an absent disregard of appearances. Behind her came a younger lady, a sallow and pinched woman of about thirty, very slight and tall.

As they passed Eleanor and her companion, the elder woman threw a lingering glance at the strangers. The scrutiny of it was perhaps somewhat imperious. The younger lady walked past stiffly with her eyes on the ground.

Eleanor and Father Benecke were naturally silent as they passed. Eleanor had just begun to speak again when she heard herself suddenly addressed in French.

She looked up in astonishment and saw that the old lady had returned and was standing before her.

'Madame—you allow me to address you?'

Eleanor bowed.

'You are staying at Santa Trinita, I believe!'

'Oui, Madame. We arrived yesterday.'

The Contessa's examining eye, whereof the keenness was but just duly chastened by courtesy, took note of that delicate and frail refinement which belonged both to Eleanor's person and dress.

'I fear, Madame, you are but roughly housed at the Trinita. They are not accustomed to English ladies. If my daughter and I, who are residents here, can be of any service to you, I beg that you will command us.'

Eleanor felt nothing but an angry impatience. Could even this remote place give them no privacy? She answered however with her usual grace.

'You are very good, Madame. I suppose that I am speaking to the Contessa Guerrini?'

The other lady made a sign of assent.

'We brought a few things from Orvieto—my friend and I,' Eleanor continued. 'We shall only stay a few weeks. I think we have all that is necessary. But I am very grateful to you for your courtesy.'

Her manner, however, expressed no effusion, hardly even adequate response. The Contessa understood. She talked for a few moments, gave a few directions as to paths and points of view, pointed out a drive beyond Selvapendente on the mountain side, bowed and departed.

Her bow did not include the priest. But he was not conscious of it. While the ladies talked, he had stood apart, holding the hat that seemed to burn him, in his finger-tips, his eyes, with their vague and troubled intensity, expressing only that inward vision which is at once the paradise and the torment of the prophet.

* * * * *

Three weeks passed away. Eleanor had said no more of further travelling. For some days she lived in terror, startled by the least sound upon the road. Then, as it seemed to Lucy, she resigned herself to trust in Father Benecke's discretion, influenced also no doubt by the sense of her own physical weakness, and piteous need of rest.

And now—in these first days of July—their risk was no doubt much less than it had been. Manisty had not remembered Torre Amiata—another thorn in Eleanor's heart! He must have left Italy. As each fresh morning dawned, she assured herself drearily that they were safe enough.

As for the heat, the sun indeed was lord and master of this central Italy. Yet on the high tableland of Torre Amiata the temperature was seldom oppressive. Lucy, indeed, soon found out from her friend the Carabiniere that while malaria haunted the valley, and scourged the region of Bolsena to the south, the characteristic disease of their upland was pneumonia, caused by the daily ascent of the labourers from the hot slopes below to the sharp coolness of the night.

No, the heat was not overwhelming. Yet Eleanor grew paler and feebler. Lucy hovered round her in a constantly increasing anxiety. And presently she began to urge retreat, and change of plan. It was madness to stay in the south. Why not more at once to Switzerland, or the Tyrol?

Eleanor shook her head.

'But I can't have you stay here,' cried Lucy in distress.

And coming closer, she chose her favourite seat on the floor of the loggia and laid her head against Eleanor's arm.

'Oughtn't you to go home?' she said, in a low urgent voice, caressing Eleanor's hand. 'Send me back to Uncle Ben. I can go home any time. But you ought to be in Scotland. Let me write to Miss Manisty!'

Eleanor laid her hand on her mouth. 'You promised!' she said, with her sweet stubborn smile.

'But it isn't right that I should let you run these risks. It—it—isn't kind to me.'

'I don't run risks. I am as well here as anywhere. The Orvieto doctor saw no objection to my being here—for a month, at any rate.'

'Send me home,' murmured Lucy again, softly kissing the hand she held. 'I don't know why I ever came.'

Eleanor started. Her lips grew pinched and bitter. But she only said:

'Give me our six weeks. All I want is you—and quiet.'

She held out both her hands very piteously, and Lucy took them, conquered, though not convinced.

'If anything went really wrong,' said Eleanor, 'I am sure you could appeal to that old Contessa. She has the face of a mother in Israel.'

'The people here seem to be pretty much in her hand,' said Lucy, as she rose. 'She manages most of their affairs for them. But poor, poor thing!—did you see that account in the Tribuna this morning?'

The girl's voice dropped, as though it had touched a subject almost too horrible to be spoken of.

Eleanor looked up with a sign of shuddering assent. Her daily Tribuna, which the postman brought her, had in fact contained that morning a letter describing the burial—after three months!—of the remains of the army slain in the carnage of Adowa on March 1. For three months had those thousands of Italian dead lain a prey to the African sun and the African vultures, before Italy could get leave from her victorious foe to pay the last offices to her sons.

That fine young fellow of whom the neighbourhood talked, who seemed to have left behind him such memories of energy and goodness, his mother's idol, had his bones too lain bleaching on that field of horror? It did not bear thinking of.

Lucy went downstairs to attend to some household matters. It was about ten o'clock in the morning, and presently Eleanor heard the postman from Selvapendente knock at the outer door. Marie brought up the letters.

There were four or five for Lucy, who had never concealed her address from her uncle, though she had asked that it might be kept for a while from other people. He had accordingly forwarded some home-letters, and Marie laid them on the table. Beside them were some letters that Lucy had just written and addressed. The postman went his round through the village; then returned to pick them up.

Marie went away, and suddenly Eleanor sprang from the sofa. With a flush and a wild look she went to examine Lucy's letters.

Was all quite safe? Was Lucy not tampering with her, betraying her in any way? The letters were all for America, except one, addressed to Paris. No doubt an order to a tradesman? But Lucy had said nothing about it—and the letter filled Eleanor with a mad suspicion that her weakness could hardly repress.

'Why! by now—I am not even a lady!' she said to herself at last with set teeth, as she dragged herself from the table, and began to pace the loggia.

But when Lucy returned, in one way or another Eleanor managed to inform herself as to the destination of all the letters. And then she scourged and humbled herself for her doubts, and became for the rest of the morning the most winning and tender of companions.

As a rule they never spoke of Manisty. What Lucy's attitude implied was that she had in some unwitting and unwilling way brought trouble on Eleanor; that she was at Torre Amiata to repair it; and that in general she was at Eleanor's orders.

Of herself she would not allow a word. Beyond and beneath her sweetness Eleanor divined a just and indomitable pride. And beyond that Mrs. Burgoyne could not penetrate.



CHAPTER XVIII

Meanwhile Eleanor found some distraction in Father Benecke.

The poor priest was gradually recovering a certain measure of serenity. The two ladies were undoubtedly of great assistance to him. They became popular in the village, where they and their wants set flowing a stream of lire, more abundant by far than had hitherto attended the summer guests, even the Sindaco of Selvapendente. They were the innocent causes, indeed, of some evil. Eleanor had been ordered goats' milk by the Orvieto doctor, and the gentleman who had secured the order from the massaja went in fear of his life at the hands of two other gentlemen who had not been equally happy. But in general they brought prosperity, and the popular smile was granted them.

So that when it was discovered that they were already acquainted with the mysterious foreign priest, and stoutly disposed to befriend him, the village showed the paralysing effect of a conflict of interests. At the moment and for various reasons the clericals were masters. And the clericals denounced Father Benecke as a traitor and a heretic. At the same time the village could not openly assail the ladies' friend without running the risk of driving the ladies themselves from Torre Amiata. And this clearly would have been a mere wanton slight to a kind Providence. Even the children understood the situation, and Father Benecke now took his walks unmolested by anything sharper than sour looks and averted faces.

Meanwhile he was busy in revising a new edition of his book. This review of his own position calmed him. Contact with all the mass of honest and laborious knowledge of which it was a summary gave him back his dignity, raised him from the pit of humiliation into which he seemed to have fallen, and strengthened him to resist. The spiritual privations that his state brought him could be sometimes forgotten. There were moments indeed when the iron entered into his soul. When the bell of the little church rang at half-past five in the morning, he was always there in his corner by the door. The peasants brushed past him suspiciously as they went in and out. He did not see them. He was absorbed in the function, or else in a bitter envy of the officiating priest, and at such moments he suffered all that any 'Vaticanist' could have wished him to suffer.

But when he was once more among his books, large gusts of a new and strange freedom began, as it were, to blow about him. In writing the philosophical book which had now brought him into conflict with the Church, he had written in constraint and timidity. A perpetual dread, not only of ecclesiastical censure but of the opinion of old and valued friends; a perpetual uncertainty as to the limits of Catholic liberty; these things had held him in bondage. What ought he say? What must he leave unsaid? He understood perfectly that hypothesis must not be stated as truth. But the vast accumulation of biological fact on the one hand, and of historical criticism on the other, that has become the common property of the scientific mind, how was it to be recapitulated—within Catholic limits? He wrote in fear, like one walking on the burning ploughshares of the ordeal. Religion was his life; but he had at once the keen intelligence and the mystical temperament of the Suabian. He dreaded the collision which ultimately came. Yet the mental process could not be stayed.

Now, with the final act of defiance, obscurely carried out, conditioned he knew not how, there had arrived for him a marvellous liberation of soul. Even at sixty-five he felt himself tragically new-born—naked and feeble indeed, but still with unknown possibilities of growth and new life before him.

His book, instead of being revised, must be re-written. No need now to tremble for a phrase! Let the truth be told. He plunged into his old studies again, and the world of thought met him with a friendlier and franker welcome. On all sides there was a rush and sparkle of new light. How far he must follow and submit, his trembling soul did not yet know. But for the moment there was an extraordinary though painful exhilaration—the excitement of leading-strings withdrawn and walls thrown down.

This enfranchisement brought him, however, into strange conflict with his own character. His temperament was that of the ascetic and visionary religious. His intelligence had much the same acuteness and pliancy as that of another and more pronounced doubter—a South German also, like Father Benecke,—the author of the 'Leben Jesu.' But his character was the joint product of his temperament and his habits, and was often difficult to reconcile with the quick play of his intelligence.

For instance, he was, in daily habit, an austere and most devout priest, living alone with his old sister, as silent and yet fervent as himself, and knowing almost nothing of other women, except through the Confessional. To his own astonishment he was in great request as a director. But socially he knew very little of his penitents; they were to him only 'souls,' spiritual cases which he studied with the ardour of a doctor. Otherwise the small benefice which he held in a South German town, his university class, and the travail of his own research absorbed him wholly.

Hence a great innocence and unworldliness; but also an underlying sternness towards himself and others. His wants were small, and for many years the desires of the senses had been dead within him. Towards women he felt, if the truth were known, with that strange unconscious arrogance which is a most real and very primitive element in Catholicism, notwithstanding the worship of Mary and the glories of St. Teresa and St. Catharine. The Church does not allow any woman, even a 'religious,' to wash the corporal and other linen which has been used in the Mass. There is a strain of thought implied in that prohibition which goes deep and far—back to the dim dawn of human things. It influences the priest in a hundred ways; it affected even the tender and spiritual mind of Father Benecke. As a director of women he showed them all that impersonal sweetness which is of the essence of Catholic tradition; but they often shrank nevertheless from what they felt to be a fundamental inflexibility mingled with pity.

Thus when he found himself brought into forced contact with the two ladies who had invaded his retreat, when Lucy in a hundred pretty ways began to show him a young and filial homage, when Eleanor would ask him to coffee with them, and talk to him about his book and the subjects it discussed, the old priest was both amazed and embarrassed.

How in the world did she know anything about such things? He understood that she had been of assistance to Mr. Manisty: but that it had been the assistance of a comrade and an equal—that had never entered his head.

So that at first Mrs. Burgoyne's talk silenced and repelled him. He was conscious of the male revolt of St. Paul!—'I suffer not a woman to teach'; and for a time he hung back.

On his visit to the villa, and on her first meeting with him at Torre Amiata, he had been under the influence of a shock which had crushed the child in him and broken down his reserve. Yet that reserve was naturally strong, together with certain despotic instincts which Eleanor perceived with surprise beneath his exquisite gentleness. She sometimes despaired of taming him.

Nevertheless when Eleanor presently advised him to publish a statement of his case in a German periodical; when the few quick things she said showed a knowledge of the German situation and German current literature that filled him with astonishment; when with a few smiles, hints, demurs, she made plain to him that she perfectly understood where he had weakened his book—which lay beside her—out of deference to authority, and where it must be amended, if it was to produce any real influence upon European cultivated opinion, the old priest was at first awkward or speechless. Then slowly he rose to the bait. He began to talk; he became by degrees combative, critical, argumentative. His intelligence took the field; his character receded. Eleanor had won the day.

Presently, indeed, he began to haunt them. He brought to Eleanor each article and letter as it arrived, consulting her on every phase of a controversy, concerning him and his book, which was now sweeping through certain Catholic circles and newspapers. He was eager, forgetful, exacting even. Lucy began to dread the fatigue that he sometimes produced. While for Lucy he was still the courteous and paternal priest, for Eleanor he gradually became—like Manisty—the intellectual comrade, crossing swords often in an equal contest, where he sometimes forgot the consideration due to the woman in the provocation shown him by the critic.

And when she had tamed him, it was to Eleanor all ashes and emptiness!

'This is the kind of thing I can always do,' she said to herself one day, throwing out her hands in self-scorn, as he left her on the loggia, where he had been taking coffee with herself and Lucy.

And meanwhile what attracted her was not in the least the controversialist and the man of letters—it was the priest, the Christian, the ascetic.

Torn with passion and dread as she was, she divined in him the director; she felt towards him as the woman so often feels towards that sexless mystery, the priest. Other men are the potential lovers of herself or other women; she knows herself their match. But in this man set apart, she recognises the embodied conscience, the moral judge, who is indifferent to her as a woman, observant of her as a soul. Round this attraction she flutters, and has always fluttered since the beginning of things. It is partly a yearning for guidance and submission; partly also a secret pride that she who for other men is mere woman, is, for the priest, spirit, and immortal. She prostrates herself; but at the same time she seems to herself to enter through her submission upon a region of spiritual independence where she is the slave, not of man but of God.

What she felt also, tortured as she was by jealousy and angry will, was the sheer longing for human help that must always be felt by the lonely and the weak. Confession, judgment, direction—it was on these tremendous things that her inner mind was brooding all the time that she sat talking to Father Benecke of the Jewish influence in Bavaria, or the last number of the 'Civilta Cattolica.'

* * * * *

One evening at the beginning of July Eleanor and Lucy were caught in the woods by a thunder-shower. The temperature dropped suddenly, and as they mounted the hill towards the convent Eleanor in her thin white dress met a blast of cold wind that followed the rain.

The result was chill and fever. Lucy and Marie tended her as best they could, but her strength appeared to fail her with great rapidity, and there came an evening when Lucy fell into a panic of anxiety.

Should she summon the local doctor—a man who was paid 80l. a year by the Municipio of Selvapendente, and tended the Commune of Torre Amiata?

She had discovered, however, that he was not liked by the peasants. His appearance was not attractive, and she doubted whether she could persuade Eleanor to see him.

An idea struck her. Without consulting Mrs. Burgoyne, she took her hat and boldly walked up to the Palazzo on the hill. Here she inquired for the Contessa Guerrini. The Contessa, however, was out; Lucy left a little note in French asking for advice. Could they get a good doctor at Selvapendente, or must she send to Orvieto?

She had hardly reached home before an answer followed her from the Contessa, who regretted extremely that Mademoiselle Foster should not have found her at home. There was a good doctor at Selvapendente, and the Contessa would have great pleasure in sending a mounted messenger to fetch him. She regretted the illness of Madame. There was a fair farmacia in the village. Otherwise she was afraid that in illness the ladies would not find themselves very well placed at Torre Amiata. Would Mademoiselle kindly have her directions for the doctor ready, and the messenger would call immediately?

Lucy was sincerely grateful and perhaps a little astonished. She was obliged to tell Eleanor, and Eleanor showed some restlessness, but was too unwell to protest. The doctor came and proved to be competent. The fever was subdued, and Eleanor was soon convalescent. Meanwhile flowers, fruit, and delicacies were sent daily from the Palazzo, and twice did the Contessa descend from her little victoria at the door of the convent courtyard, to inquire for the patient.

On each occasion Lucy saw her, and received the impression of a dignified, kind, and masterful woman, bowed by recent grief, but nevertheless sensitively alive in a sort of old-fashioned stately way to the claims of strangers on the protection of the local grandee. It seemed to attract her that Lucy was American, and that Eleanor was English.

'I have twice visited England,' she said, in an English that was correct, but a little rusty. 'My husband learnt many things from England—for the estate. But I wonder, Mademoiselle, that you come to us at this time of year?'

Lucy laughed and coloured. She said it was pleasant to see Italy without the forestieri; that it was like surprising a bird on its nest. But she stumbled a little, and the Contessa noticed both the blush and the stumbling.

When Eleanor was able to go out, the little carriage was sent for her, and neither she nor Lucy knew how to refuse it. They drove up and down the miles of zig-zag road that Don Emilio had made through the forest on either side of the river, connecting the Palazzo Guerrini with the casa di caccia on the mountain opposite. The roads were deserted; grass was beginning to grow on them. The peasants scarcely ever used them. They clung to the old steep paths and tracts that had been theirs for generations. But the small smart horses, in their jingling harness, trotted briskly along; and Eleanor beside her companion, more frail and languid than ever, looked listlessly out upon a world of beauty that spoke to her no more.

And at last a note from the Contessa arrived, asking if the ladies would honour her and her daughter by taking tea with them at the Palazzo. 'We are in deep mourning and receiving no society,' said the note; 'but if Madame and her friend will visit us in this quiet way it will give us pleasure, and they will perhaps enjoy the high view from here over our beautiful country.'

Eleanor winced and accepted.

* * * * *

The Palazzo, as they climbed up through the village towards it, showed itself to be an imposing pile of the later seventeenth century, with heavily-barred lower windows, and, above, a series of graceful loggie on its northern and western fronts which gave it a delicate and habitable air. On the north-eastern side the woods, broken by the stone-fall of the Sassetto, sank sharply to the river; on the other the village and the vineyards pressed upon its very doors. The great entrance gateway opened on a squalid village street, alive with crawling babies and chatting mothers.

At this gateway, however—through which appeared a courtyard aglow with oleanders and murmurous with running water—they were received with some state. An old majordomo met them, accompanied by two footmen and a carrying-chair. Eleanor was borne up a high flight of stone stairs, and through a vast and bare 'apartment' of enormous rooms with tiled or brick floors and wide stone cheminees, furnished with a few old chests and cabinets, a collection of French engravings of the last century, and some indifferent pictures. A few of the rooms were frescoed with scenes of hunting or social life in a facile eighteenth-century style. Here and there was a piece of old tapestry or a Persian carpet. But as a whole, the Palazzo, in spite of its vastness, made very much the impression of an old English manor house which has belonged to people of some taste and no great wealth, and has grown threadbare and even ugly with age. Yet tradition and the family remain. So here. A frugal and antique dignity, sure of itself and needing no display, breathed in the great cool spaces.

The Contessa and her daughter were in a small and more modern salone looking on the river and the woods. Eleanor was placed in a low chair near the open window, and her hostess could not forbear a few curious and pitying glances at the sharp, high-bred face of the Englishwoman, the feverish lips, and the very evident emaciation, which the elegance of the loose black dress tried in vain to hide.

'I understand, Madame,' she said, after Eleanor had expressed her thanks with the pretty effusion that was natural to her, 'that you were at Torre Amiata last autumn?'

Eleanor started. The massaja, she supposed, had been gossiping. It was disagreeable, but good-breeding bade her be frank.

'Yes, I was here with some friends, and your agent gave us hospitality for the night.'

The Contessa looked astonished.

'Ah!' she said, 'you were here with the D——'s?'

Eleanor assented.

'And you spent the winter in Rome?'

'Part of it. Madame, you have the most glorious view in the world!' And she turned towards the great prospect at her feet.

The Contessa understood.

'How ill she is!' she thought; 'and how distinguished!'

And presently Eleanor on her side, while she was talking nervously and fast on a good many disconnected subjects, found herself observing her hostess. The Contessa's strong square face had been pale and grief-stricken when she saw it first. But she noticed now that the eyelids were swollen and red, as though from constant tears; and the little sallow daughter looked sadder and shyer than ever. Eleanor presently gathered that they were living in the strictest seclusion and saw no visitors. 'Then why'—she asked herself, wondering—'did she speak to us in the Sassetto?—and why are we admitted now? Ah! that is his portrait!'

For at the Contessa's elbow, on a table specially given up to it, she perceived a large framed photograph draped in black. It represented a tall young man in an Artillery uniform. The face was handsome, eager, and yet melancholy. It seemed to express a character at once impatient and despondent, but held in check by a strong will. With a shiver Eleanor again recalled the ghastly incidents of the war; and the story they had heard from the massaja of the young man's wound and despair.

Her heart, in its natural lovingness, went out to his mother. She found her tongue, and she and the Contessa talked till the twilight fell of the country and the peasants, of the improvements in Italian farming, of the old convent and its history.

Not a word of the war; and not a word, Eleanor noticed, of their fellow-lodger, Father Benecke. From various indications she gathered that the sallow daughter was devote and a 'black.' The mother, however, seemed to be of a different stamp. She was at any rate a person of cultivation. That, the books lying about were enough to prove. But she had also the shrewdness and sobriety, the large pleasant homeliness, of a good man of business. It was evident that she, rather than her fattore, managed her property, and that she perfectly understood what she was doing.

In truth, a secret and strong sympathy had arisen between the two women. During the days that followed they met often.

The Contessa asked no further questions as to the past history or future plans of the visitors. But indirectly, and without betraying her new friends, she made inquiries in Rome. One of the D—— family wrote to her:

'The English people we brought with us last year to your delicious Torre Amiata were three—a gentleman and two ladies. The gentleman was a Mr. Manisty, a former member of the English Parliament, and very conspicuous in Rome last winter for a kind of Brunetiere alliance with the Vatican and hostility to the Italian regime. People mostly regarded it as a pose; and as he and his aunt were rich and of old family, and Mr. Manisty was—when he chose—a most brilliant talker, they were welcome everywhere, and Rome certainly feted them a good deal. The lady staying with them was a Mrs. Burgoyne, a very graceful and charming woman whom everybody liked. It was quite plain that there was some close relation between her and Mr. Manisty. By which I mean nothing scandalous! Heavens! nobody ever thought of such a thing. But I believe that many people who knew them well felt that it would be a very natural and right thing that he should marry her. She was evidently touchingly devoted to him—acting as his secretary, and hanging on his talk. In the spring they went out to the hills, and a young American girl—quite a beauty, they say, though rather raw—went to stay with them. I heard so much of her beauty from Madame Variani that I was anxious to see her. Miss Manisty promised to bring her here before they left in June. But apparently the party broke up suddenly, and we saw no more of them.

'Now I think I have told you the chief facts about them. I wonder what makes you ask? I often think of poor Mrs. Burgoyne, and hope she may be happy some day. I can't say, however, that Mr. Manisty ever seemed to me a very desirable husband! And yet I was very sorry you were not at home in the autumn. You might have disliked him heartily, but you would have found him piquant and stimulating. And of all the glorious heads on man's shoulders he possesses the most glorious—the head of a god attached to a rather awkward and clumsy body.'

Happy! Well, whatever else might have happened, the English lady was not yet happy. Of that the Contessa Guerrini was tolerably certain after a first conversation with her. Amid the gnawing pressure of her own grief there was a certain distraction in the observance of this sad and delicate creature, and in the very natural speculations she aroused. Clearly Miss Foster was the young American girl. Why were they here together, in this heat, away from all their friends?

* * * * *

One day Eleanor was sitting with the Contessa on a loggia in the Palazzo, looking north-west towards Radicofani. It was a cool and rather cloudy evening, after a day of gasping heat. The majordomo suddenly announced; 'His reverence, Don Teodoro.'

The young padre parroco appeared—a slim, engaging figure, as he stood for an instant amid the curtains of the doorway, glancing at the two ladies with an expression at once shy and confiding.

He received the Contessa's greeting with effusion, bowing low over her hand. When she introduced him to the English lady, he bowed again ceremoniously. But his blue eyes lost their smile. The gesture was formal, the look constrained. Eleanor, remembering Father Benecke, understood.

In conversation with the Contessa however he recovered a boyish charm and spontaneity that seemed to be characteristic. Eleanor watched him with admiration, noticing also the subtle discernment of the Italian, which showed through all his simplicity of manner. It was impossible to mistake, for instance, that he felt himself in a house of mourning. The movements of body and voice were all at first subdued and sympathetic. Yet the mourning had passed into a second stage, and ordinary topics might now be introduced. He glided into them with the most perfect tact.

He had come for two reasons. First, to announce his appointment as Select Preacher for the coming Advent at a well-known church in Rome; secondly, to bring to the Contessa's notice a local poet—gifted, but needy—an Orvieto man, whose Muse the clergy had their own reasons for cultivating.

The Contessa congratulated him, and he bowed profoundly in a silent pleasure.

Then he took up the poet, repeating stanza after stanza with a perfect naivete, in his rich young voice, without a trace of display; ending at last with a little sigh, and a sudden dropping of the eyes, like a child craving pardon.

Eleanor was delighted with him, and the Contessa, who seemed more difficult to please, also smiled upon him. Teresa, the pious daughter, was with Lucy in the Sassetto. No doubt she was the little priest's particular friend. He had observed at once that she was not there, and had inquired for her.

'One or two of those lines remind me of Carducci, and that reminds me that I saw Carducci for the first time this spring,' said the Contessa, turning to Eleanor. 'It was at a meeting of the Accademia in Rome. A great affair—the King and Queen—and a paper on Science and Religion, by Mazzoli. Perhaps you don't remember his name? He was our Minister of the Interior a few years ago.'

Eleanor did not hear. Her attention was diverted by the sudden change in the aspect of the padre parroco. It was the dove turned hawk. The fresh face seemed to have lost its youth in a moment, to have grown old, sharp, rancorous.

'Mazzoli!'—he said, as the Contessa paused—'Eccellenza, e un Ebreo!'

The Contessa frowned. Yes, Mazzoli was a Jew, but an honest man; and his address had been of great interest, as bearing witness to the revival of religious ideas in circles that had once been wholly outside religion. The parroco's lips quivered with scorn. He remembered the affair—a scandalous business! The King and Queen present, and a Jew daring before them, to plead the need of 'a new religion'—in Italy, where Catholicism, Apostolic and Roman, was guaranteed as the national religion—by the first article of the Statuto. The Contessa replied with some dryness that Mazzoli spoke as a philosopher. Whereupon the parroco insisted with heat that there could be no true philosophy outside the Church. The Contessa laughed and turned upon the young man a flashing and formidable eye.

'Let the Church add a little patriotism to her philosophy, Father,—she will find it better appreciated.'

Don Teodoro straightened to the blow. 'I am a Roman, Eccellenza—you also—Scusi!'

'I am an Italian, Father—you also. But you hate your country.'

Both speakers had grown a little pale.

'I have nothing to do with the Italy of Venti Settembre,' said the priest, twisting and untwisting his long fingers in a nervous passion. 'That Italy has three marks of distinction before Europe—by which you may know her.'

'And those—?' said the Contessa, calm and challenging.

'Debt, Eccellenza—hunger!—crimes of blood! Sono il suo primato—l'unico!'

He threw at her a look sparkling and venomous. All the grace of his youth had vanished. As he sat there, Eleanor in a flash saw in him the conspirator and the firebrand that a few more years would make of him.

'Ah!' said the Contessa, flushing. 'There were none of these things in the old Papal States?—under the Bourbons?—the Austrians? Well—we understand perfectly that you would destroy us if you could!'

'Eccellenza, Jesus Christ and his Vicar come before the House of Savoy!'

'Ruin us, and see what you will gain!'

'Eccellenza, the Lord rules.

'Well—well. Break the eggs—that's easy. But whether the omelet will be as the Jesuits please—that's another affair.'

Each combatant smiled, and drew a long breath.

'These are our old battles,' said the Contessa, shaking her head. 'Scusi! I must go and give an order.'

And to Eleanor's alarm, she rose and left the room.

The young priest showed a momentary embarrassment at being left alone with the strange lady. But it soon passed. He sat a moment, quieting down, with his eyes dropped, his finger-tips lightly joined upon his knee. Then he said sweetly:

'You are perhaps not acquainted with the pictures in the Palazzo, Madame. May I offer you my services? I believe that I know the names of the portraits.'

Eleanor was grateful to him, and they wandered through the bare rooms, looking at the very doubtful works of art that they contained.

Presently, as they returned to the salone from which they had started, Eleanor caught sight of a fine old copy of the Raphael St. Cecilia at Bologna. The original has been much injured, and the excellence of the copy struck her. She was seized, too, with a stabbing memory of a day in the Bologna Gallery with Manisty!

She hurried across the room to look at the picture. The priest followed her.

'Ah! that, Madame,' he said with enthusiasm—that is a capolavoro. It is by Michael Angelo.'

Eleanor looked at him in astonishment. 'This one? It is a copy, Padre, of Raphael's St. Cecilia at Bologna—a very interesting and early copy.'

Don Teodoro frowned. He went up to look at it doubtfully, pushing out his lower lip.

'Oh! no, Madame,' he said, returning to her, and speaking with a soft yet obstinate complacency. 'Pardon me—but you are mistaken. That is an original work of the great Michael Angelo.'

Eleanor said no more.

When the Contessa returned, Eleanor took up a volume of French translations from the Greek Anthology that the Contessa had lent her the day before. She restored the dainty little book to its mistress, pointing to some of her favourites.

The parroco's face fell as he listened.

'Ah!—these are from the Greek!' he said, looking down modestly, as the Contessa handed him the book. 'I spent five years, Eccellenza, in learning Greek, but—!' He shrugged his shoulders gently.

Then glancing from one lady to the other, he said with a deprecating smile:

'I could tell you some things. I could explain what some of the Greek words in Italian come from—"mathematics," for instance.'

He gave the Greek word with a proud humility, emphasising each syllable.

'"Economy"—"theocracy"—"aristocracy."'

The Greek came out like a child's lesson. He was not always sure; he corrected himself once or twice; and at the end he threw back his head with a little natural pride.

But the ladies avoided looking either at him or each other.

Eleanor thought of Father Benecke; of the weight of learning on that silver head. Yet Benecke was an outcast, and this youth was already on the ladder of promotion.

When he departed the Contessa threw up her hands.

'And that man is just appointed Advent Preacher at one of the greatest churches in Rome!'

Then she checked herself.

'At the same time, Madame,' she said, looking a little stiffly at Eleanor, 'we have learned priests—many of them.'

Eleanor hastened to assent. With what heat had Manisty schooled her during the winter to the recognition of Catholic learning, within its own self-chosen limits!

'It is this deplorable Seminary education!' sighed the Contessa. 'How is one half of the nation ever to understand the other? They speak a different language. Imagine all our scientific education on the one side, and this—this dangerous innocent on the other! And yet we all want religion—we all want some hope beyond this life.'

Her strong voice broke. She turned away, and Eleanor could only see the massive outline of head and bust, and the coils of grey hair.

Mrs. Burgoyne drew her chair nearer to the Contessa. Silently and timidly she laid a hand upon her knee.

'I can't understand,' she said in a low voice, 'how you have had the patience to be kind to us, these last weeks!'

'Do you know why?' said the Contessa, turning round upon her, and no longer attempting to conceal the tears upon her fine old face.

'No—tell me!'

'It was because Emilio loved the English. He once spent a very happy summer in England. I—I don't know whether he was in love with anyone. But, at any rate, he looked back to it with deep feeling. He always did everything that he could for any English person—and especially in these wilds. I have known him often take trouble that seemed to me extravagant or quixotic. But he always would. And when I saw you in the Sassetto that day, I knew exactly what he would have done. You looked so delicate—and I remembered how rough the convent was. I had hardly spoken to anybody but Teresa since the news came, but I could not help speaking to you.'

Eleanor pressed her hand. After a pause she said gently:

'He was with General Da Bormida?'

'Yes—he was with Da Bormida. There were three columns, you remember. He was with the column that seemed for a time to be successful. I only got the full account last week from a brother-officer, who was a prisoner till the end of June. Emilio, like all the rest, thought the position was carried—that it was a victory. He raised his helmet and shouted, Viva il Re! Viva l'Italia! And then all in a moment the Scioans were on them like a flood. They were all carried away. Emilio rallied his men again and again under a hail of bullets. Several heard him say: "Courage, lads—courage! Your Captain dies with you! Avanti! avanti! Viva l'Italia!" Then at last he was frightfully wounded, and perhaps you may have heard in the village'—again the mother turned her face away—' that he said to a caporale beside him, who came from this district, whom he knew at home—"Federigo, take your gun and finish it." He was afraid—my beloved!—of falling into the hands of the enemy. Already they had passed some wounded, horribly mutilated. The caporale refused. "I can't do that, Eccellenza," he said; "but we will transport you or die with you!" Then again there was a gleam of victory. He thought the enemy were repulsed. A brother-officer saw him being carried along by two soldiers, and Emilio beckoned to him. "You must be my Confessor!" he said, smiling. And he gave him some messages for me and Teresa—some directions about his affairs. Then he asked: "It is victory—isn't it? We have won, after all?" And the other—who knew—couldn't bear to tell him the truth. He said, "Yes." And Emilio said, "You swear it?" "I swear." And the boy made the sign of the cross—said again, Viva l'Italia!—and died.... They buried him that night under a little thicket. My God! I thank Thee that he did not lie on that accursed plain!'

She raised her handkerchief to hide her trembling lips. Eleanor said nothing. Her face was bowed upon her hands, which lay on the Contessa's knee.

'His was not a very happy temperament,' said the poor mother presently.' He was always anxious and scrupulous. I sometimes thought he had been too much influenced by Leopardi; he was always quoting him. That is the way with many of our young men. Yet Emilio was a Christian—a sincere believer. It would have been better if he had married. But he gave all his affection to me and Teresa—and to this place and the people. I was to carry on his work—but I am an old woman—and very tired. Why should the young go before their time?... Yet I have no bitterness about the war. It was a ghastly mistake—and it has humiliated us as a nation. But nations are made by their blunderings as much as by their successes. Emilio would not have grudged his life. He always thought that Italy had been "made too quick," as they say—that our day of trial and weakness was not done.... But, Gesu mio!—if he had not left me so much of life.'

Eleanor raised her head.

'I, too,' she said, almost in a whisper—'I, too, have lost a son. But he was a little fellow.'

The Contessa looked at her in astonishment and burst into tears.

'Then we are two miserable women!' she said, wildly.

Eleanor clung to her—but with a sharp sense of unfitness and unworthiness. She felt herself a hypocrite. In thought and imagination her boy now was but a hovering shadow compared to Manisty. It was not this sacred mother-love that was destroying her own life.

* * * * *

As they drove home through the evening freshness, Eleanor's mind pursued its endless and solitary struggle.

Lucy sat beside her. Every now and then Eleanor's furtive guilty look sought the girl's face. Sometimes a flying terror would grip her by the heart. Was Lucy graver—paler? Were there some new lines round the sweet eyes? That serene and virgin beauty—had it suffered the first withering touch since Eleanor had known it first? And if so, whose hand? whose fault?

Once or twice her heart failed within her; foreseeing a remorse that was no sooner imagined than it was denied, scouted, hurried out of sight.

That brave, large-brained woman with whom she had just been talking; there was something in the atmosphere which the Contessa's personality shed round it, that made Eleanor doubly conscious of the fever in her own blood. As in Father Benecke's case, so here; she could only feel herself humiliated and dumb before these highest griefs—the griefs that ennoble and enthrone.

That night she woke from a troubled sleep with a stifled cry of horror. In her dreams she had been wrestling with Manisty, trying to thrust him back with all the frenzied force of her weak hands. But he had wrenched himself from her hold. She saw him striding past her—aglow, triumphant. And that dim white form awaiting him—and the young arms outstretched!

'No, no! False! She doesn't—doesn't love him!' her heart cried, throwing all its fiercest life into the cry. She sat up in bed trembling and haggard. Then she stole into the next room. Lucy lay deeply, peacefully asleep. Eleanor sank down beside her, hungrily watching her. 'How could she sleep like that—if—if she cared?' asked her wild thoughts, and she comforted herself, smiling at her own remorse. Once she touched the girl's hand with her lips, feeling towards her a rush of tenderness that came like dew on the heat of the soul. Then she crept back to bed, and cried, and cried—through the golden mounting of the dawn.



CHAPTER XIX

The days passed on. Between Eleanor and Lucy there had grown up a close, intense, and yet most painful affection. Neither gave the other her full confidence, and on Eleanor's side the consciousness both of the futility and the enormity of what she had done only increased with time, embittering the resistance of a will which was still fierce and unbroken.

Meanwhile she often observed her companion with a quick and torturing curiosity. What was it that Manisty had found so irresistible, when all her own subtler arts had failed?

Lucy was in some ways very simple, primitive even, as Manisty had called her. Eleanor knew that her type was no longer common in a modern America that sends all its girls to college, and ransacks the world for an experience. But at the same time the depth and force of her nature promised rich developments in the future. She was still a daughter of New England, with many traits now fast disappearing; but for her, too, there was beginning that cosmopolitan transformation to which the women of her race lend themselves so readily.

And it was Manisty's influence that was at work! Eleanor's miserable eyes discerned it in a hundred ways. Half the interests and questions on which Manisty's mind had been fixed for so long were becoming familiar to Lucy. They got books regularly from Rome, and Eleanor had been often puzzled by Lucy's selections—till one day the key to them flashed across her.

The girl indeed was making her way, fast and silently, into quite new regions of thought and feeling. She read, and she thought. She observed the people of the village; she even frequented their humble church, though she would never go with Eleanor to Sunday Mass. There some deep, unconquerable instinct held her back.

All through, indeed, her personal beliefs and habits—Evangelical, unselfish, strong, and a little stern—seemed to be quite unchanged. But they were differently tinged, and would be in time differently presented. Nor would they ever, of themselves, divide her from Manisty. Eleanor saw that clearly enough. Lucy could hold opinion passionately, unreasonably even; but she was not of the sort that makes life depend upon opinion. Her true nature was large, tolerant, patient. The deepest forces in it were forces of feeling, and no intellectual difference would ever be able to deny them their natural outlet.

Meanwhile Lucy seemed to herself the most hopelessly backward and ignorant person, particularly in Eleanor's company.

'Oh! I am just a dunce,' she said one day to Eleanor, with a smile and sigh, after some questions as to her childhood and bringing up. 'They ought to have sent me to college. All the girls I knew went. But then Uncle Ben would have been quite alone. So I just had to get along.'

'But you know what many girls don't know.'

Lucy gave a shrug.

'I know some Latin and Greek, and other things that Uncle Ben could teach me. But oh! what a simpleton I used to feel in Boston!'

'You were behind the age?

Lucy laughed.

'I didn't seem to have anything to do with the age, or the age with me. You see, I was slow, and everybody else was quick. But an American that isn't quick's got no right to exist. You're bound to have heard the last thing, and read the last book, or people just want to know why you're there!'

'Why should people call you slow?' said Eleanor, in that voice which Lucy often found so difficult to understand, because of the strange note of hostility which, for no reason at all, would sometimes penetrate through the sweetness. 'It's absurd. How quickly you've picked up Italian—and frocks!—and a hundred things.'

She smiled, and stroked the brown head beside her.

Lucy coloured, bent over her work, and did not reply.

Generally they passed their mornings in the loggia reading and working. Lucy was a dexterous needle-woman, and a fine piece of embroidery had made much progress since their arrival at Torre Amiata. Secretly she wondered whether she was to finish it there. Eleanor now shrank from the least mention of change; and Lucy, having opened her generous arms to this burden, did not know when she would be allowed to put it down. She carried it, indeed, very tenderly—with a love that was half eager remorse. Still, before long Uncle Ben must remonstrate in earnest. And the Porters, whom she had treated so strangely? They were certainly going back to America in September, if not before. And must she not go with them?

And would the heat at Torre Amiata be bearable for the sensitive Northerner after July? Already they spent many hours of the day in their shuttered and closed rooms, and Eleanor was whiter than the convolvulus which covered the new-mown hayfields.

What a darling—what a kind and chivalrous darling was Uncle Ben! She had asked him to trust her, and he had done it nobly, though it was evident from his letters that he was anxious and disturbed. 'I cannot tell you everything,' she had written, 'or I should be betraying a confidence; but I am doing what I feel to be right—what I am sure you would consent to my doing if you knew. Mrs. Burgoyne is very frail—and she clings to me. I can't explain to you how or why—but so it is. For the present I must look after her. This place is beautiful; the heat not yet too great; and you shall hear every week. Only, please, tell other people that I wish you to forward letters, and cannot long be certain of my address.'

And he:

'Dear child, this is very mysterious. I don't like it. It would be absurd to pretend that I did. But I haven't trusted my Lucy for fourteen years in order to begin to persecute her now because she can't tell me a secret. Only I give you warning that if you don't write to me every week, my generosity, as you call it, will break down—and I shall be for sending out a search party right away.... Do you want money? I must say that I hope July will see the end of your adventure.'

Would it? Lucy found her mind full of anxious thoughts as Eleanor read aloud to her.

Presently she discovered that a skein of silk she wanted for her work was not in her basket. She turned to look also in her old inlaid workbox, which stood on a small table beside her. But it was not there.

'Please wait a moment,' she said to her companion. 'I am afraid I must get my silk.'

She stood up hastily, and her movement upset the rickety cane table. With a crash her workbox fell to the ground, and its contents rolled all over the loggia. She gave a cry of dismay.

'Oh! my terra-cottas!—my poor terra-cottas!'

Eleanor started, and rose too, involuntarily, to her feet. There on the ground lay all the little Nemi fragments which Manisty had given to Lucy, and which had been stowed away, each carefully wrapped in tissue paper, in the well of her old workbox.

Eleanor assisted to pick them up, rather silently. The note of keen distress in Lucy's voice rang in her ears.

'They are not much hurt, luckily,' she said.

And indeed, thanks to the tissue paper, there were only a few small chips and bruises to bemoan when Lucy at last had gathered them all safely into her lap. Still, chips and bruises in the case of delicate Graeco-Roman terra-cottas are more than enough to make their owner smart, and Lucy bent over them with a very flushed and rueful face, examining and wrapping them up again.

'Cotton-wool would be better,' she said anxiously. 'How have you put your two away?'

Directly the words were out of her mouth she felt that they had been better unspoken.

A deep flush stained Eleanor's thin face.

'I am afraid I haven't taken much care of them,' she said hurriedly.

They were both silent for a little. But while Lucy still had her lap full of her treasures, Eleanor again stood up.

'I will go in and rest for an hour before dejeuner. I think I might go to sleep.'

She had passed a very broken night, and Lucy looked at her with tender concern. She quickly but carefully laid aside her terra-cottas, that she might go in with Eleanor and 'settle her' comfortably.

But when she was left to rest in her carefully darkened room, and Lucy had gone back to the loggia, Eleanor got no wink of sleep. She lay in an anguish of memory, living over again that last night at the villa—thinking of Manisty in the dark garden and her own ungovernable impulse.

Presently a slight sound reached her from the loggia. She turned her head quickly. A sob?—from Lucy?

Her heart stood still. Noiselessly she slipped to her feet. The door between her and the loggia had been left ajar for air. It was partially glazed, with shutters of plain green wood outside, and inside a muslin blind. Eleanor approached it.

Through the chink of the door she saw Lucy plainly. The girl had been sitting almost with her back to the door, but she had turned so that her profile and hands were visible.

How quiet she was! Yet never was there an attitude more eloquent. She held in her hands, which lay upon her knee, one of the little terra-cottas. Eleanor could see it perfectly. It was the head of a statuette, not unlike her own which she had destroyed,—a smaller and ruder Artemis with the Cybele crown. There flashed into her mind the memory of Manisty explaining it to the girl, sitting on the bench behind the strawberry hut; his black brows bent in the eagerness of his talk; her sweet eyes, her pure pleasure.

And now Lucy had no companion—but thought. Her face was raised, the eyes were shut, the beautiful mouth quivered in the effort to be still. She was mistress of herself, yet not for the moment wholly mistress of longing and of sorrow. A quick struggle passed over the face. There was another slight sob. Then Eleanor saw her raise the terra-cotta, bow her face upon it, press it long and lingeringly to her lips. It was like a gesture of eternal farewell; the gesture of a child expressing the heart of a woman.

Eleanor tottered back. She sat on the edge of her bed, motionless in the darkness, till the sounds of Cecco bringing up the pranzo in the corridor outside warned her that her time of solitude was over.

* * * * *

In the evening Eleanor was sitting in the Sassetto. Lucy with her young need of exercise had set off to walk down through the wood to the first bridge over the Paglia. Eleanor had been very weary all day, and for the first time irritable. It was almost with a secret relief that Lucy started, and Eleanor saw her depart.

Mrs. Burgoyne was left stretched on her long canvas chair, in the green shade of the Sassetto. All about her was a chaos of moss-grown rocks crowned with trees young and old; a gap in the branches showed her a distant peachy sky suffused with gold above the ethereal heights of the Amiata range; a little wind crept through the trees; the birds were silent, but the large green lizards slipped in and out, and made a friendly life in the cool shadowed place.

The Contessa was to have joined Eleanor here at six o'clock. But a note had arrived excusing her. The visit of some relations detained her.

Nevertheless a little after six a step was heard approaching along the winding path which while it was still distant Eleanor knew to be Father Benecke. For his sake, she was glad that the Contessa was not with her.

As for Donna Teresa, when she met the priest in the village or on the road she shrank out of his path as though his mere shadow brought malediction.

Her pinched face, her thin figure seemed to contract still further under an impulse of fear and repulsion. Eleanor had seen it, and wondered.

But even the Contessa would have nothing to say to him.

'Non, Madame; c'est plus fort que moi!' she had said to Eleanor one day that she had come across Mrs. Burgoyne and Father Benecke together in the Sassetto—in after-excuse for her behaviour to him. 'For you and me—bien entendu!—we think what we please. Heaven knows I am not bigoted. Teresa makes herself unhappy about me.' The stout, imperious woman stifled a sigh that betrayed much. 'I take what I want from our religion—and I don't trouble about the rest. Emilio was the same. But a priest that disobeys—that deserts—! No! that is another matter. I can't argue; it seizes me by the throat.' She made an expressive movement. 'It is an instinct—an inheritance—call it what you like. But I feel like Teresa; I could run at the sight of him.'

Certainly Father Benecke gave her no occasion to run. Since his recovery from the first shock and agitation of his suspension he had moved about the roads and tracks of Torre Amiata with the 'recollected' dignity of the pale and meditative recluse. He asked nothing; he spoke to no one, except to the ladies at the convent, and to the old woman who served him unwillingly in the little tumble-down house by the river's edge to which he had now transferred himself and his books, for greater solitude. Eleanor understood that he shrank from facing his German life and friends again till he had completed the revision of his book, and the evolution of his thought; and she had some reason to believe that he regarded his isolation and the enmity of this Italian neighbourhood as a necessary trial and testing, to be borne without a murmur.

As his step came nearer, she sat up and threw off her languor. It might have been divined, even, that she heard it with a secret excitement.

When he appeared he greeted her with the manner at once reticent and cordial that was natural to him. He had brought her an article in a German newspaper of the 'Centre' on himself and his case, the violence of which had provoked him to a reply, whereof the manuscript was also in his pocket.

Eleanor took the article and turned it over. But some inward voice told her that her role, of counsellor and critic was—again—played out. Suddenly Father Benecke said:

'I have submitted my reply to Mr. Manisty. I would like to show you what he says.'

Eleanor fell back in her chair. 'You know where he is?' she cried.

Her surprise was so great that she could not at once disguise her emotion. Father Benecke was also taken aback. He lifted his eyes from the papers he held.

'I wrote to him through his bankers the other day, Madame. I have always found that letters so addressed to him are forwarded.'

Then he stopped in distress and perturbation. Mrs. Burgoyne was still apparently struggling for breath and composure. His absent, seer's eyes at last took note of her as a human being. He understood, all at once, that he had before him a woman very ill, apparently very unhappy, and that what he had just said had thrown her into an anguish with which her physical weakness was hardly able to cope.

The colour rose in his own cheeks.

'Madame! let me hasten to say that I have done your bidding precisely. You were so good as to tell me that you wished no information to be given to anyone as to your stay here. I have not breathed a word of it to Mr. Manisty or to any other of my correspondents. Let me show you his letter.'

He held it out to her. Eleanor took it with uncertain fingers.

'Your mention of him took me by surprise,' she said, after a moment. 'Miss Foster and I—have been—so long—without hearing of our friends.'

Then she stooped over the letter. It seemed to her the ink was hardly dry on it—that it was still warm from Manisty's hand. The date of it was only three days old. And the place from which it came? Cosenza?—Cosenza in Calabria? Then he was still in Italy?

She put the letter back into Father Benecke's hands.

'Would you read it for me? I have rather a headache to-day.'

He read it with a somewhat embarrassed voice. She lay listening, with her eyes closed under her large hat, each hand trying to prevent the trembling of the other.

A strange pride swelled in her. It was a kind and manly letter, expressing far more personal sympathy with Benecke than Manisty had ever yet allowed himself—a letter wholly creditable indeed to the writer, and marked with a free and flowing beauty of phrase that brought home to Eleanor at every turn his voice, his movements, the ideas and sympathies of the writer.