"No," said John, "it is the earth that might be jealous, for, until I saw my lady-love, she was the undivided mistress of my heart. For the rest, my lady-love enjoys, upon this point, my entire confidence. I have kept nothing from her."

"That is well," approved Maria Dolores. "And the sky and the sea," still softly laughing, she asked, "have they no place in your affections?

"The sky is her tiring-maiden, and I love the sky for that," said John. "'Tis the sky that clothes her in her many-coloured raiment, and holds the light whereby her beauty is made manifest. And the sea is a jewel that she bears upon her bosom,—a magical jewel, whence, with the sky's aid, she draws the soft rain that is her scent and her cosmetic. 'Fragrant the fertile earth after soft showers.' Do you know, I could almost forgive the dour and detestable Milton everything for the sake of those seven words. They show that in the sense of smell he had at least one attribute of humanity."

Maria Dolores' dark eyes were quizzical.

"The dour and detestable Milton?" she exclaimed. "Poor Milton! What has he done to merit such anathema?

"It isn't what he has done, but what he was," said John. "That he was dour nobody will deny, dour and sour and inhuman. Ask those unfortunate, long-suffering daughters of his, if you doubt it. They could tell you stories. But he was worse. He was a scribe and a Pharisee, a pragmatical, self-righteous, canting old scribe and Pharisee. And he was worse still, and still worse yet. He was—what seems to me to-day the worstest thing unhung—he was a Puritan. Like Winthorpe's, his blood was black and icy and vinegarish. Like Winthorpe—But there. I mustn't abuse Winthorpe any more, and I must try to forgive Milton. Milton wrote seven good words, and Winthorpe unwittingly opened a lover's eyes to his condition."

He paused, and smiled down upon her, and his newly opened (and very blue) blue eyes said much. Her eyes were dreaming on the landscape, where it shone in pearl and gold. However, as she gave no sign of finding his conversation wearisome, he took heart, and continued.

"For when he told me how he had put his love away, never again to see her, and how at that moment she would be scrubbing floors (or taking the discipline, perhaps?) in a convent of Ursulines, suddenly, and without any action of the will on my part, there rose before me the vision of a certain woman;—a woman I knew a little, admired immensely, very much liked, but didn't for an instant suppose I was seriously in love with. And involuntarily, with the vision of her before me, I asked myself whether, mutatis mutandis, I could have done as he had, and in a flash I saw that I could not,—that not for the wealth of Ormus and of Ind could I or would I give her up, if once I had her. So, by that token, and by the uncommon wrath with which his tale inflamed me," John, with a rhetorical flourish, perorated, "I discovered that I loved." And again his eyes said much.

Hers were still on the prospect.

"Yet if you only know her a little, how can you love her?" she asked, in a musing voice.

"Did I say I only know her a little?" asked John. "I know her a great deal. I know her through and through. I know that she is pure gold, pure crystal; that she is made of all music, all light, all sweetness, and of all shadow and silence and mystery too, as women should be. I know that earth holds naught above her. I do not care to employ superlatives, so, to put it in the form of an understatement, I know that she is simply and absolutely perfect. If you could see her! If you could see her eyes, her deep-glowing, witty, humorous, mischievous, innocent eyes, with the soul that burns in them, the passion that sleeps. If you could see the black soft masses of her hair, and her white brow, and the pale-rose of her cheeks, and the red-rose of her lovely smiling mouth. If you could see her figure, slender and strong, and the grace and pride of her carriage,—the carriage of an imperial princess. If you could see her hands,—they lie in her lap like languid lilies. And her voice,—'tis the colour of her mouth and the glow of her eyes made audible. And if you could whisper to yourself her melodious and thrice adorable name. I know her a great deal. When I said that I only knew her a little, I meant it in the sense that she only knows me a little,—which after all, alas, for practical purposes comes to the same thing."

He had spoken with emphasis, with fervour, his pink face animated and full of intention. Maria Dolores kept her soft-glowing eyes resolutely away from him, but I think the soul that burned in them (if not the passion that slept) was vaguely troubled. Qui pane d'amour—how does the French proverb run? Did she vaguely feel perhaps that the seas they were sailing were perilous? Anyhow, as John saw with sinking heart, she was at the point of putting an end to their present conjunction,—she was preparing to rise. He would have given worlds to offer a helping hand, but (however rich in worlds) he was, for the occasion, poor in courage. When love comes in at the door, assurance as like as not will fly out of the window. So she rose unaided.

"Let us hope," she said, giving him a glance in which he perceived an under-gleam as of not unfriendly mockery, "that she will soon come to know you better."

"Heaven forbid!" cried he, with a fine simulation of alarm. "It is upon her ignorance of my true character that I base such faint hopes as I possess of some day winning her esteem."

Maria Dolores laughed, nodded, and lightly moved away.

"My son," said John to himself, "you steered precious close to the wind. You had best be careful."

And then he was conscious of a sudden change in things. The garden smiled about him, the valley below laughed in the breeze, the blackcaps sang, the many windows of the Castle glistened in the sun; but their beauty and their pleasantness had departed, had retired with her into the long, low, white-walled, red-roofed pavilion. He was conscious of a sudden change in things, and of a sudden acute and bitter depression within himself.

"These are great larks," he said; "great larks while they last,—but what's the good of them in the end? What do they lead to? What's the good of coquetting with blisses that can't be yours?" And he breathed a prodigious sigh. "When shall I see her again?" he asked, and thereupon was seized by his old terror—his terror of yesterday, though it seemed to him a terror he had known all his life—lest he should never see her again. "She's only a visitor. What's to prevent her leaving this very night?"

The imagination was intolerable. He entered the Castle court, and climbed the staircase of honour, and rambled through the long suites of great empty rooms, empty of everything save the memory of the past and the portraits of the dead, there, if he might, for a time at least, to lose himself and to forget her.



V

"Who is the young man you have been talking with so long?" asked Frau Brandt, as Maria Dolores came into her sitting-room, a vast, square, bare room, with a marble floor and a painted ceiling, with Venetian blinds to shelter it from the sun, and a bitter-sweet smell, as of rosemary or I know not what other aromatic herb, upon its cool air.

"Oh? You saw us?" said Maria Dolores, answering the question with question.

"Him I have seen many times—every day for a week at least," said Frau Brandt. "But I never before saw you talking with him. Who is he?" She was a small, brown, square-built, black-haired, homely-featured old woman, in a big, round starched white cap and a flowing black silk gown. She sat in an uncushioned oaken armchair by the window, with some white knitting in her bony, blunt-fingered brown hands, and tortoise-shell-rimmed spectacles on her nose. But the spectacles couldn't hide the goodness or the soundness or the sweetness that looked forth from her motherly old honest brown eyes.

"He is a young man who lives en pension at the presbytery," said Maria Dolores, "a young Englishman."

"So?" said Frau Brandt. "What is his name?"

"I don't know," said Maria Dolores, with disengagement real or feigned. "His Christian name, I believe, is John."

"But his family name?" persisted Frau Brandt.

"It is probably Brown, Jones, or Robinson," said Maria Dolores. "Or it may even be Black, Smith, or Johnson. Most Englishmen are named one or the other."

"So?" said Frau Brandt. "But is it prudent or seemly for you to talk familiarly with a young man whose name is unknown to you?"

"Why not?" asked Maria Dolores, raising her eyebrows, as if surprised. "He seems a very harmless young man. I don't think he will eat me. And he is English,—and I like English people. And he is intelligent,—his conversation amuses me. And he has nice easy, impetuous manners,—so different from the formality and restraint of Austrian young men. What can his name matter?"

"But"—Frau Brandt looked up impressively over her spectacles, and her voice was charged with gravity, for she was about to ask a question to the Teutonic mind of quite supreme importance—"but is he noble?" It was to her what—nay, more than what—the question, "Is he respectable?" would have been to an Englishwoman.

Maria Dolores laughed.

"Oh, no," she said. "At least I have every reason to believe not, and I devoutly hope not. He belongs I expect to what they call in England the middle class. He has an uncle who is a farmer."

Frau Brandt's good old brown eyes showed her profoundly shocked, and expressed profound reprehension.

"But you were speaking with him familiarly—you were speaking with him almost as an equal," she pronounced in bated accents, in accents of consternation.

Again Maria Dolores laughed.

"True," she assented gaily, "and that is exactly what I couldn't do if he were noble. Then I should have to remember our respective positions. But where the difference of rank is so great, one can talk familiarly without fear. Ca n'engage a rien."

Frau Brandt nodded her head, for full half a minute, with many meanings; she nodded it now up and down, and now shook it sidewise.

"I do not like it," she said, at last. "Your brother would not like it. It is not becoming. Well, thanks be to Heaven, he is only English."

"Oh, of course," agreed Maria Dolores, "if he were Austrian, it would be entirely different."

"But is it fair to the young man himself?" pursued Frau Brandt. "Is he aware that he is hobanobbing with a Serene Highness? You treat him as an equal. What if he should fall in love with you?"

"What indeed! But he won't," laughed Maria Dolores, possibly with a mental reservation.

"Who can tell?" said Frau Brandt. "His eyes, when he looked at you, had an expression. But there is a greater danger still. You are both at the dangerous age. He is good-looking. What if your heart should become interested in him?"

"Oh, in that case," answered Maria Dolores, lightly, her chin a little in the air, "I should marry him—if he asked me."

"What!" cried Frau Brandt, half rising from her chair.

"Yes," said Maria Dolores, cheerfully unexcited. "He is a man of breeding and education, even if he isn't noble. If I loved a man, I shouldn't give one thought to his birth. I'm tired of all our Austrian insistence upon birth, upon birth and quarterings and precedencies. If ever I love, I shall love some one just for what he is, for what God has made him, and for nothing else. It wouldn't matter if his father were a cobbler—if I loved him, I'd marry him." Her chin higher in the air, she had every appearance of meaning what she said.

Frau Brandt had sunk back in her chair, and was nodding her white-capped old head again.

"Oh, my child, my child," she grieved. "Will you never rid your fancy of these high-flown, unpractical, romantic whimsies? It all comes of reading poetry." She herself, good woman, read little but her prayers.

"Oh, my dear true Heart," responded Maria Dolores, laughing. She crossed the room, and placed her hand affectionately upon Frau Brandt's shoulder. "My dearest old Nurse! Do not distress yourself. This is not yet a question of actuality. Let us not cry before we are hurt." And she stooped, and kissed her nurse's brown old brow.

But afterwards she stood looking with great pensiveness out of the window, stood so for a long while; and I fancy there was a softer glow than ever in her soft-glowing eyes, and perhaps a livelier rose in her pale-rose cheeks.

"What are you thinking so deeply about?" Frau Brandt asked by-and-by.

Maria Dolores woke with a little start, and turned from the window, and laughed again.

"Oh, thinking about my cobbler's son, of course," she said.



VI

Annunziata, seeking him to announce that supper was ready, found John, seated in his chamber of dead ladies, his arms folded, his legs crossed, his eyes fixed, a frown upon his prone brow; his spirit apparently rapt in a brown study.

"Eh! Prospero!" she called.

Whereat he came to himself glanced up, glanced round, changed his posture, and finally, rising, blew his preoccupations from him in a deep, deep sigh.

"Oh, what a sigh!" marvelled Annunziata, making big eyes. "What are you sighing so hard for?"

John looked at her, and smiled.

"Sighing for my miller's daughter, my dear," he said.

And, as he followed her to the presbytery, he sang softly to himself—

"It is the miller's daughter, And she is grown so dear, so dear, That I would be the jewel That trembles in her ear."



PART FIFTH



I

It was Sunday. It was early morning. It was raining,—a fine quiet, determined rain, that blurred the lower reaches of the valley, and entirely hid the mountain-tops, so that one found it hard not to doubt a little whether they were still there. Near at hand the garden was as if a thin web of silver had been cast over it, pale and dim, where wet surfaces reflected the diffused daylight. And just across the Rampio, on the olive-clad hillside that rose abruptly from its brink, rather an interesting process was taking place,—the fabrication of clouds, no less. The hillside, with its rondure of blue-grey foliage, would lie for a moment quite bare and clear; then, at some high point, a mist would begin to form, would appear indeed to issue from the earth, as smoke from a subterranean fire, white smoke with pearly shadows; would thicken and spread out; would draw together and rise in an irregular spiral column, curling, swaying, poising, as if uncertain what to do next; and at last, all at once making up its mind, (how like a younker or a prodigal!), would go sailing away, straggling away, amorphous, on a puff of wind, leaving the hillside clear again;—till, presently, the process would recommence da capo.

John and Annunziata, seated together on a marble bench in the shelter of the great cloister, with its faded frescoes, at the north-eastern extremity of the castle buildings, had been watching this element-play for some minutes in silence. But by-and-by Annunziata spoke.

"What makes the cloud come out of the hill like that?" she asked, her eyes anxiously questioning his. "I have seen it happen many times, but I could never understand it. There cannot be a fire underneath?"

"If you can't understand it, Mistress Wisdom," responded John, smiling on her, "you surely mustn't expect a featherpate like me to. Between ourselves, I don't believe any one can really understand it, though there's a variety of the human species called scientists who might pretend they could. It's all a part of that great scheme of miracles by which God's world goes on, Nature, which nobody can really understand in the very least. All that the chaps called scientists can really do is to observe and more or less give names to the miracles. They can't explain 'em."

"It is great pleasure to watch such things," said Annunziata. "It is a great blessing to be allowed to see a miracle performed with your own eyes."

"So it is," agreed John. "And if you keep your eyes well open, there's not a minute of the livelong day when you mayn't see one."

"It is very strange," said Annunziata, "but when the sun shines, then I love the sunny weather, and am glad that it does not rain. Yet when it does rain, then I find that I love the rain too, that I love it just as much as the sun,—it is so fresh, it smells so good, the raindrops are so pretty, and they make such a pretty sound where they fall, and the grey light is so pleasant."

"Our loves," said John, "are always very strange. Love is the rummest miracle of them all. It is even more difficult to account for than the formation of clouds on the hillside."

"We love the things that give us pleasure," said Annunziata.

"And the people, sometimes, who give us pain," said John.

"We love the people, first of all, who are related to us," said Annunziata, "and then the people we see a great deal of—just as I love, first of all, my uncle, and then you and Marcella the cook."

"Who brings in the inevitable veal," said John. "Thank you, Honeymouth." He bowed and laughed, while Annunziata's grave eyes wondered what he was laughing at. "But it isn't every one," he pointed out, "who has your solid and well-balanced little head-piece. It isn't every one who keeps his love so neatly docketed, or so sanely submitted to the sway of reason. Some of us love first of all people who aren't related to us in the remotest degree, and people we've seen hardly anything of and know next to nothing about."

Annunziata deprecatingly shook her head.

"It is foolish to love people we know nothing about," she declared, in her deep voice, and looked a very sage delivering judgment.

"True enough," said John. "But what would you have? Some of us are born to folly, as the sparks fly upward. You see, there's a mighty difference between love and love. There's the love which is affection, there's the love which is cupboard-love, and there's the love which is just simply love-love and nothing else. The first, as you have truly observed, has its roots in consanguinity or association, the second in a lively hope of future comfits, and either is sufficiently explicable. But the third has its roots apparently in mere haphazard and causelessness, and isn't explicable by any means whatsoever, and yet is far and away the violentest of the three. It falls as the lightning from the clouds, and strikes whom it will. Though I mix my metaphors fearlessly, like a man, I trust, with your feminine intuition, you follow me?"

"No," said Annunziata, without compunction, her eyes on the distance. "I don't know what you mean."

"Thank Heaven you don't, pray Heaven you never may," said her inconsequential friend. "For love-love is a plague. You meet a person, for example, in a garden. You know nothing whatever about her, not even her name, though you fear it may be Schmidt. You meet her not more than half a dozen times all told. And suddenly one morning you wake up to discover that she has become to you the person of first importance in the world. She is practically a total stranger to you, she's of a different nationality, a different rank, yet she's infinitely the most precious and important person in the world. When you're absent from her you can do nothing but think of her, gloating with throes of aromatic pain over the memory of your last meeting with her, longing with soul-hunger for your next. The merest flutter of her gown, modulation of her voice, glance of her eye, will throw your heart into a palpitation. You look in the direction of the house that she inhabits, and you feel the emotions of a Peri looking at the gate of Eden. And it gives you the strangest sort of strange joy to talk about her, though of course you take pains to talk about her in veiled terms, obliquely, so that your listener shan't guess whom you are talking about. In short, she is the be-all and the end-all of your existence,—and you don't even know her name, though you fear it may be Schmidt."

He lolled back at ease on the marble bench, and twirled his yellow-red moustaches, fancy free.

"But you do know her name," said Annunziata, simply, in her deepest voice, holding him with a gaze, lucent and serious, that seemed almost reproachful. "Her name is Maria Dolores."

The thing was tolerably unexpected. What wonder if it put my hero out of countenance? His attitude grew rigid, his pink skin three shades pinker; his blue eyes stared at her, startled. So for a second; then he relaxed, and laughed, laughed long and heartily, perhaps a little despitefully too, at his own expense. ... But he must try, if he might, to repair the mischief.

"My poor child," he said, resting his hand on her curls, and gently smoothing them. "You are what the French call an enfant terrible. You are what the English call a deuced sharp little pickle. And I must try, if I can, without actually lying, to persuade you that you are utterly mistaken, utterly and absolutely mistaken,"—he raised his voice, for greater convincingness,—"and that her name is nothing distantly resembling the name that you have spoken, and that in fact her name is Mrs. Harris, and that in fine there is no such person, and that I was merely talking hypothetically, in abstractions; I must draw a herring across the trail, I must raise a dust, and throw a lot of it into your amazingly clear-sighted little eyes. Now, is it definitely impressed upon you that her name is not—the thrice-adorable name you mentioned?"

"I thought it was," answered Annunziata. "I am sorry it is not." And then she dismissed the subject. "See, it is raining harder. See how the rain comes down in long strings of beads,—see how it is like a network of long strings of glass beads falling through the air. When the rain comes down like that, it means that after the rain stops it will be very hot. To-morrow it will be very hot."

The bell in the clock-tower tolled out seven solemn strokes; then the lighter-toned and nimbler-tongued bell of the church began to ring.

"Come," peremptorily said Annunziata, jumping up. "Mass."

She held out her hand, took John's, and, like a mother, led the meek and unquestioning young man to his duties.



II

Of course there are no such heretical inventions as pews in the parish church of Sant' Alessina. You sit upon orthodox rush-bottomed chairs, you kneel upon orthodox bare stones. But at the Epistle side of the altar, at an elevation of perhaps a yard from the pavement, there is a recess in the wall, enclosed by a marble balustrade, and hung with faded red curtains, which looks, I'm afraid, a good deal like a private box at a theatre, and is in fact the tribune reserved for the masters of the Castle. (In former days those masters were the Sforzas. So, from this tribune, the members of that race of iron and blood, of fierceness and of guile, have assisted at the mystical sacrifice of the Lamb of God!) Heretofore, during John's residence at the presbytery, the tribune had stood vacant. To-day it was occupied by Maria Dolores and Frau Brandt. Maria Dolores, instead of wearing a hat, had adopted the ancient and beautiful use of draping a long veil of black lace over her dark hair.

John knelt in the middle of the church, in the thick of the ragged, dirty, unsavoury villagers. When Mass was over, he returned to the cloisters, and there, face to face, he met the lady of his dreams.

She graciously inclined her head.

"Good morning," she said, smiling, in a voice that seemed to him full of morning freshness.

"Good morning," he responded, wondering whether she could hear the tremor of his heart. "Though, in honest truth, it's rather a bad morning, isn't it?" he submitted, posing his head at an angle, dubious and reflective, that seemed to raise the question to a level of philosophic import.

"Oh, with these cloisters, one shouldn't complain," said she, glancing indicatively round. "One can still be out of doors, and yet not get the wetting one deserves. And the view is so fine, and these faded old frescoes are so droll."

"Yes," said he, his wits, for the instant, in a state of suspended animation. "The view is fine, the frescoes are droll."

She looked as if she were thinking about something.

"Don't you find it," she asked, after a moment, with the slightest bepuzzled drawing together of her eyebrows, "a trifle unpleasant, hearing Mass from where you do?"

John looked blank.

"Unpleasant? No. Why?" he asked.

"I should think it might be disagreeable to be hemmed in and elbowed by those extraordinarily ragged and dirty people," she explained. "It's a pity they shouldn't clean themselves up a little before coming to church."

"Ah, yes," he assented, "a little cleaning up wouldn't hurt them; that's very certain. But," he set forth, in extenuation, "it's not the custom of the country, and the fact that it isn't has its good significance, as well as its bad. It's one of the many signs of how genuinely democratic and popular the Church is in Italy,—as it ought to be everywhere. It is here essentially the Church of the people, the Church of the poor. It is the one place where the poorest man, in all his rags, and with the soil of his work upon him, feels perfectly at ease, perfectly at home, perfectly equal to the richest. It is the one place where a reeking market-woman, with her basket on her arm, will feel at liberty to take her place beside the great lady, in her furs and velvets, and even to ask her, with a nudge, to move up and make room. That is as it should be, isn't it?"

"No doubt, no doubt," agreed Maria Dolores, beginning to pace backwards and forwards over the lichen-stained marble pavement, (stained as by the hand of an artist, in wavy veins of yellow or pale-green, with here and there little rosettes of scarlet), while John kept beside her. "All the same, I should not like to kneel quite in the very heart of the crowd, as you do."

"You are a delicate and sensitive woman," he reminded her. "I am a man, and a moderately tough one. However, I must admit that until rather recently I had exactly your feeling. But I got a lesson." He broke off and gave a vague little laugh, vaguely rueful, as at a not altogether pleasant reminiscence.

"What was the lesson?" she asked.

"Well," said he, "if you care to know, it was this. The first time that I attended Mass here, desiring to avoid the people, I sought out a far corner of the church, behind a pillar, where there was no one. But as soon as I had got myself well established there, up hobbled a deformed and lame old man, and plumped himself down beside me, so close that our coat-sleeves touched. I think he was the most repulsive-looking old man I have ever seen; he was certainly the dirtiest, the grimiest, and his rags were extravagantly foul. I will spare you a more circumstantial portrait. And all through Mass I was sick with disgust and sore with resentment. Why should he come and rub his coat-sleeve against mine, when there was room in plenty for him elsewhere? The next time I went to church, I chose a different corner, as remote as might be from my former one; but again, no sooner was I well installed, than, lo and behold, the same unspeakable old man limped up and knelt with me, cheek by jowl. And so, if you can believe it, the next time, and so the next. It didn't matter where I placed myself, there he was sure to place himself too. You will suppose that, apart from my annoyance, I was vastly perplexed. Why should he pursue me so? Who was he? What was he after? And for enlightenment I addressed myself to Annunziata. 'Who is the hideous old man who always kneels beside me?' I asked her. She had not noticed any one kneeling beside me, she said; she had noticed, on the contrary, that I always knelt alone, at a distance. 'Well,' said I, 'keep your eyes open to-day, and you will see the man I mean.' So we went to Mass, and sure enough, no sooner had I found a secluded place, than my old friend appeared and joined me, dirtier and more hideous and if possible more deformed than ever.

"Yes?" said Maria Dolores, with interest, as he paused.

"When we came out of church, I asked Annunziata who he was," continued John. "And she said that though she had kept her eyes open, according to my injunction, she had failed to see any one kneeling beside me—that, on the contrary, she had seen me," he concluded, with an insouciance that was plainly assumed for its dramatic value, "kneeling alone, at a distance from every one."

Maria Dolores' face was white. She frowned her mystification.

"What!" she exclaimed, in a half-frightened voice.

"That is precisely the ejaculation that fell from my own lips at the time," said John. "Then I gave her a minute description of the old man, in all his ugliness. And then she administered my lesson to me."

"Yes? What was it?" questioned Maria Dolores, her interest acute.

"Speaking in that oracular vein of hers, her eyes very big, her face very grave, she assured me that my horrible old man had no objective existence. She informed me cheerfully and calmly that he was an image of my own soul, as it appeared, corrupted and aged and deformed by the sins of a lifetime, to God and to the Saints. And she added that he was sent to punish me for my pride in thinking myself different to the common people, and in seeking to hold myself aloof. Since then," John brought his anecdote to a term, "I have always knelt in the body of the church, and I have never again seen my Doppelgaenger."

Maria Dolores was silent for a little. They had come to the southern end of the cloisters, where the buttresses of the Castle walls, all shaggy-mantled in a green overgrowth of creepers, fall precipitously away, down the steep face of a natural cliff. They stopped here, and stood looking off. The rain had held up, though the valley was still misty with its vapours. Whiffs of velvety air, warm and sweet, blew in their faces, lightly stirred the dark hair about her brow, and, catching the flowery edge of her black lace mantilla, set it fluttering.

"That is a very good story," she said, by-and-by, with a sober glance, behind which there was the glint of laughter. "In view of it, however, I suppose there will be no use in my delivering a message I am charged with for you from my friend Frau Brandt."

"Oh?" questioned John. "What message?"

"Frau Brandt has received from the owner of the Castle the privilege of hearing Mass from the tribune; and she wished me to invite you in her name hereafter to hear Mass from there with us. But I suppose, in view of your 'lesson,' that is an invitation which you will decline?" The glint of laughter shone brighter in her eyes, and her mouth had a tiny pucker, amiably derisive.

John looked at her, his blue eyes bold.

"That is an invitation which I am terribly tempted to accept," he said, in a voice of unconcealed emotion, of patent meaning; and beneath his bold gaze, her dark eyes dropped, while I think a blush faintly swept her cheeks. "And first of all," he added, "pray express to Frau Brandt my grateful thanks for it—and let me thank you also for your kindness in conveying it. If, in spite of my temptation, I don't accept it, that will be for a very special reason, and one quite unconnected with my 'lesson.'"

Maria Dolores probably knew her danger. She turned, and began to walk backwards, towards the point where you can pass from the cloisters, through the great porte-cochere, into the garden, and so on to the pavilion beyond the clock. She probably knew her danger; but she was human, but she was a woman. Besides, she had reached the porte-cochere, and thus commanded a clear means of escape. So, coming to a standstill here, "What is the very special reason?" she asked, in a low voice, keeping her eyes from his.

His were bolder than ever. Infinite admiration of her burned in them, infinite delight in her, desire for her; at the same time a kind of angry hopelessness darkened them, and a kind of bitter amusement, as of one amused at his own sad plight.

"I wish I were rich," he exclaimed, irritably, between his teeth.

"Oh? Is that the very special reason?" asked she, with two notes of laughter.

"No," said he, "but it has a connection with it. You see, I'm in love."

"Yes," said she. "I remember your telling me so."

"Well, I wish I were rich," said he. "Then I might pluck up courage to ask the woman I love to be my wife."

"Money isn't everything here below," said she. "I have your own word for that."

"What else counts," said he, "when you wish to ask a woman to marry you?"

"Oh, many things," said she. "Difference of rank, for example."

"That wouldn't count with me," said the democratic fellow, handsomely. "I shouldn't give two thoughts to differences of rank."

Maria Dolores smiled—at her secret reflections, I suppose.

"But poverty puts it out of all question," John moodily went on. "I couldn't ask a woman to come and share with me an income of sixpence a week. Especially as I have grounds for believing that she's in rather affluent circumstances herself. Oh, I wish I were rich!" He repeated this aspiration in a groan.

"Poor, poor young man!" she commiserated him, while her eyes, which she held perseveringly averted, were soft with sympathy and gay with mirth. "When do you begin your gardening?"

"Oh, don't mock me!" he cried, with an imploring gesture. "You know, joking apart, that it's child's play for a man of my age, with no profession and no special talent, to fancy he can turn to and earn money. I might, if I made supernatural exertions, and if Fortune went out of her way to favour me, add a maximum of another sixpence to my weekly budget. No, there's never a hope for me on sea or land. I must e'en bear it, though I cannot grin withal."

"Ah, well," said Maria Dolores, to comfort him, "these attacks, I have read, are often as short as they are sharp. Let us trust you'll soon rally from this one. How long have they generally lasted in the past?"

John's face grew dark with upbraiding; the sea-blue of his eyes, the gold of his hair and beard, the pink of his complexion visibly grew dark.

"You are so needlessly unkind," he said, "that you don't deserve to hear the true answer to your question."

She studied the half-obliterated fresco on the wall beside her.

"All the same," said he, "you shall hear it. If falling in love were my habit, no doubt I shouldn't take it so hard. But the simple truth, though I am thirty years old, is that I have never before felt so much as a heart-flutter for any woman. And, since you cite your reading, I have read that a fire which may merely singe the surface of green wood, will entirely consume the dry."

She continued to study the ancient painting. Her fingers were playing with the ends of her lace veil.

"Besides," he went on, "if I had been in love a dozen times, it wouldn't signify. For I should have been in love with ordinary usual human women. They're the only sort I ever met—till I met her. She's of a totally different order—as distinct from them as ... What shall I say? Oh, as unlike them as starfire is unlike dull clay. Starfire—starfire—the wonderful, high, white-burning starfire of her spirit, that's the thing that strikes you most in her. It shines through her. It shines in her eyes, it shines in her hair, her adorable, soft, dark, warm and fragrant hair; it shines in her very voice; it shines in every word she utters, even in the unkindest."

"Dear me! what an alarmingly refulgent person you depict!" laughed Maria Dolores, her eyes still on the wall.

"I have no gift for word-painting," said John; "though I doubt if the words are yet invented that could fitly paint my lady. She grows in beauty day by day. It's a literal fact—every fresh time I see her, she is perceptibly more lovely than the last, more love-compelling in her loveliness. But 'tis a thing unpaintable, indescribable, as indescribable as the perfume of a rose. Oh, why haven't I five thousand a year?"

"You harp so persistently upon your desire for money," suggested Maria Dolores, "one might infer she was a commodity, to be bought and sold. You begin at the wrong end. What good would five or fifty thousand a year do you, if you had not begun by winning her love?

"No, I begin at the proper end, worse luck," John answered, glooming. "For, without a decent income, I have no right even to try to win her love.

"And that being so," questioned Maria Dolores, "I hope you conscientiously avoid her society, or, when you meet, make yourself consistently disagreeable to her?

"There's no need for such precautions," John replied. "There's no fear for her. She regards me as a casual and passing acquaintance. So I make myself no more disagreeable than I am by nature. And if I avoided her society, (which I am far from doing), it would be not for her sake, but for my own. For, though her society is to me a kind of anticipation of the joys of Heaven, yet when I leave it and find myself alone, the reaction is dreary in the superlative degree; and the fear, which perpetually haunts me (for I know nothing of her plans), lest I shall never see her again, is agonizing as a foretaste of—Heaven's antipode. Oh, I love her!"

He took, involuntarily I dare say, a step in her direction. She retreated under the vaulting of the porte-cochere.

"You seem," she commented, "to be getting a good deal of emotional experience,—which doubtless some day you will find of value. Why not, instead of gardener, embark as novelist or poet? Here is material you could then turn to account."

"Ah, there you are," he complained, piteously, "mocking me again. Ah, well, if you must have your laugh, have it, and welcome. A man can learn to take the bitter with the sweet."

"To spare you that discomfort," said she, moving deeper into the archway, while John's face fell, "I will bid you good-bye. I am to report, then, that you decline my friend's invitation with thanks?"

"With my most grateful thanks," he was able intensively to rejoin, in spite of his dismay at the imminence of her departure.

"And for a very special reason?" she harked back, now, suddenly, for the first time since they had touched thin ice, giving him a glance.

It was the fleetingest of fleeting glances, it was merry and ironic, but there was something in it which brought a flame to his blue eyes.

"For the very special reason," he answered, with vehemence, "that I fear the presence near me of—" He held his breath for a second, the flame in his eyes enveloping her; then, with an abrupt change of tone and mien, he ended, "—of Frau Brandt might distract my attention from the sermon."

She laughed, and said, "Good-bye."

"Good-bye," said John. And when she was halfway through the tunnel-like passage, "I suppose you know you are leaving me to a day as barren as the Desert of Sahara?" he called after her.

"Oh, who can tell what a day may bring forth?" called she, but without looking back.

For a long while John's faculties were kept busy, trying to determine whether that was a promise, a menace, or a mere word in the air.



III

"Rain before seven, clear before eleven," is as true, or as untrue, in Lombardy as it is in other parts of the world. The rain had held up, and now, in that spirited phrase of Corvo's, "here came my lord the Sun," splendidly putting the clouds to flight, or chaining them, transfigured, to his chariot-wheels; clothing the high snow-peaks in a roseate glory, (that seemed somehow, I don't know why, to accent their solitude and their remoteness); flooding the valley with ethereal amber; turning the swollen Rampio to a river of fire while the nearer hillsides, the olive woods, the trees in the Castle garden, glistened with a million million crystals, and the petals of the flowers were crystal-tipped; while the breath of the earth rose in long streamers of luminous incense, and the sky gleamed with every tender, every brilliant, tint of blue, from the blue of pale forgetmenots to the blue of larkspur.

John, contemplating this spectacle, (and thinking of Maria Dolores? revolving still her cryptic valediction?), all at once, as his eye rested on the shimmer at the valley's end which he knew to be the lake, lifted up his hand and clapped his brow. "By Jove," he muttered, "if I wasn't within an ace of clean forgetting!" The sight of the lake had fortunately put him in mind that he was engaged to-day to lunch with Lady Blanchemain at Roccadoro.

He found her ladyship, in a frock all concentric whirls of crisp white ruffles, vigorously wielding a fan, and complaining of the heat. (Indeed, as Annunziata had predicted, it had grown markedly warmer.) "I shall fly away, if this continues; I shall fly straight to town, and set my house in order for the season. When do you come?" she asked, smiling on him from her benign old eyes.

"I don't come," answered John. "I rather like town in autumn and winter, when it's too dark to see its ugliness, but save me from it in the clear light of summer."

"Fudge," said Lady Blanchemain. "London's the most beautiful capital in Europe—it's grandiose. And it's the only place where there are any people.

"Yes," said John, "but, as at Nice and Homburg, too many of them are English. And there's a liberal scattering, I've heard, of Jews?"

"Oh, Jews are all right—when they aren't Jewy," said Lady Blanchemain, with magnanimity. "I know some very nice ones. I was rather hoping you would be a feature of my Sunday afternoons."

"I'm not a society man," said John. "I've no aptitude myself for patronizing or toadying, and I don't particularly enjoy being patronized or toadied to."

"Is that the beginning and end of social life in England?" Lady Blanchemain inquired, delicately sarcastic.

"As I have seen it, yes," asseverated John. "The beginning, end, and middle of social life in England, as in Crim-Tartary, is worship of the longest pigtail,—a fetichism sometimes grosser, sometimes subtler, sometimes deliberate, often unconscious and instinctive. Every one you meet is aware that his pigtail is either longer or shorter than yours, and accordingly, more or less subtly, grossly, unconsciously or deliberately, swaggers or bends the knee. It's a state of things I've tried in vain to find diverting."

"It's a state of things you'll find prevailing pretty well in all places where the human species breeds," said Lady Blanchemain. "The only difference will be a question of what constitutes the pigtail. And are you, then, remaining at Sant' Alessina?"

"For the present," answered John.

"Until—?" she questioned.

"Oh, well, until she sends me away, or leaves herself," said he, "and so my fool's paradise achieves its inevitable end."

Lady Blanchemain laughed—a long, quiet laugh of amused contentment.

"Come in to luncheon," she said, putting her soft white hand upon his arm, "and tell me all about it." And when they were established at her table, a round table, gay with flowers, in a window at the far end of the cool, terazza-paved, stucco-columned dining-room of the Hotel Victoria, "Why do you call it a fool's paradise?" she asked.

"Well, you see, I'm in love," said he.

"You really are?" she doubted, with sprightliness, looking gleeful.

"All too really," he assured her, in a sinking voice.

"What an old witch I was!" mused she, with satisfaction. "Accept my heart-felt felicitations." She beamed upon him.

"I should prefer your condolences," said he, in a voice from the depths.

"Allons donc! Cheer up," laughed she, dallying with her bliss. "Men have died, and worms have eaten them, but not for love."

"I wonder," said John. "That is a statement, it seems to me, which would be the better for some proving."

"At all events," said she, "you, for one, are not dead yet."

"No," admitted he; "though I could almost wish I was."

"Do you mean to say she has definitely rejected you?" she demanded, alarmed.

"Fortune has spared her that necessity," said John. "I haven't asked her, and I never shall. I haven't any money."

"Pooh! Is that all?" scoffed her ladyship, relieved. "You have prospects."

"Remote ones—the remoter the better. I won't count on dead men's shoes," said John.

"What is it your little fortune-teller at the Castle calls you?" asked Lady Blanchemain, shrewdly, her dark old eyebrows up.

"She calls me lucus a non lucendo," was John's quick riposte; and the lady laughed.

But in a moment she pulled a straight face. "I seriously counsel you to have more faith," she said. "Go home and ask her to marry you; and if she accepts,—you'll see. Money will come. Besides, your rank and your prospective rank are assets which you err in not adding to the balance. Go home, and propose to her."

"'Twould do no good," said John, dejectedly. "She regards me with imperturbable indifference. I've made the fieriest avowals to her, and she's never turned a hair."

Lady Blanchemain looked bewildered. "You've made avowals—?" she falteringly echoed.

"I should rather think so," John affirmed. "Indirect ones, of course, and I hope inoffensive, but fiery as live coals. In the third person, you know. I've given her two and two; she has, you may be sure, enough skill in mathematics to put 'em together."

"And she never turned a hair?" the lady marvelled.

"She jeered at me, she mocked me, she laughed and rode away," said he.

"She's probably in love with you," said Lady Blanchemain. "If a woman will listen, if a woman will laugh! If you don't propose to her now, having ensnared her young affections, you'll be something worse than the wicked nobleman of song and story."

"Oh, well," John responded, conciliatory, "I dare say some of these days a proposal will slip out when I least intend it. So I shall have done the honourable thing—and I'm sure I can trust her to play fair and say me nay."

Lady Blanchemain slowly shook her head. "I'm glad you're not my lover," she devoutly murmured, plying her fan.

"Oh, but I am," cried John, with a bow, and an admiring flash of the eyes.

Her soft old face lighted up; then it took on an expression of resolution, and she set her strong old jaws.

"In that case," she remarked, "you will have the less reluctance in granting a favour I'm about to ask you."

"What's the favour?" said John, in a tone of readiness.

"I want you to buy a pig in a poke," said she.

"Oh?" questioned he.

"Yes," said she. "I want you to make me a promise blindfold. I want you to promise in the dark that you will do something. What it is that you're to do you're not to know till the time comes. Will you promise?"

"Dearest lady," said the trustful young man, "I'm perfectly confident that you would never ask me to do anything that I couldn't do with profit to myself. Buy a pig in a poke? From you, without a moment's hesitation. Of course I promise."

"Bravo, bravo," applauded Lady Blanchemain, glowing at her easy triumph. "In a few days you'll receive a letter. That will tell you what it is you're pledged to. And now, to reward you, come with me to my sitting-room, and I will make you a little present."

When they had reached her sitting-room (dim and cool, with its half-drawn blinds and the straw-coloured linen covers of its furniture), she put into his hands a small case of shagreen, small and hard, and at the edges white with age.

"Go to the window and see what's in it," she said.

And obeying, "By Jove, what a stunner!" he exclaimed. The case contained a ring, a light circle of gold, set with a ruby, surrounded by a row of diamonds,—for my part, I think the most beautiful ruby I have ever seen. It was as big as a hazel-nut, or almost; it was cut, with innumerable facets, in the shape of a heart; and it quivered and burned, and flowed and rippled, liquidly, with the purest, limpidest red fire.

"'Tis the spirit of a rose, distilled and crystallized," said Lady Blanchemain.

"'Tis a drop of liquid light," said John. "But why do you give it to me? I can't wear it. I don't think I ought to accept it."

"Nobody asks you to wear it," said Lady Blanchemain. "It's a woman's ring, of course. But as for accepting it, you need have no scruples. It's an old Blanchemain gem, that was in the family a hundred years before I came into it. It's properly an heirloom, and you're the heir. I give it to you for a purpose. Should you ever become engaged, I desire you to placcit upon the finger of the adventurous woman."



IV

Under a gnarled old olive, by the river's brim, Annunziata sat on the turf, head bowed, so that her curls fell in a tangle all about her cheeks, and gazed fixedly into the green waters, the laughing, dancing, purling waters, green, and, where the sun reached them, shot with seams and cleavages of light, like fluorspar. In the sun-flecked, shadow-dappled grass near by, violets tried to hide themselves, but were betrayed by their truant sweetness. The waters purled, a light breeze rustled the olive-leaves, and birds were singing loud and wild, as birds will after rain.

Maria Dolores, coming down the path that followed the river's windings, stood for a minute, and watched her small friend without speaking. But at last she called out, "Ciao, Annunziata. Are you dreaming dreams and seeing visions?"

Annunziata started and looked up. "Sh-h!" she whispered, with an admonitory gesture. She stole a wary glance roundabout, and then spoke as one fearful of being overheard. "I was listening to the music of Divopan," she said.

Maria Dolores, who had come closer, appeared at a loss. "The music of—what?" she questioned.

"Sh-h!" whispered Annunziata. "I would not dare to say it aloud. The music of Divopan."

"Divopan?" Maria Dolores puzzled, compliantly guarding her tone. "What is that?"

"Divo—Pan," said Annunziata, dividing the word in two, and always with an air of excessive caution.

But Maria Dolores helplessly shook her head. "I'm afraid I don't understand. What is Divo—Pan?"

"Don't you know what a divo is?" asked Annunziata, her clear grey eyes surprised.

"Oh, a divo?" said Maria Dolores, getting a glimmer of light. "Ah, yes, a divo is a saint, I think?

"Not exactly," Annunziata discriminated, "but something like one. The saints, you see, are always very good, and divi are sometimes bad. But they are powerful, like saints. They can do anything they wish. Divo Pan is the divo who makes all the music that you hear out of doors,—the music of the wind and the water and the bird-songs. But you must be careful never to praise his music aloud, lest Divo Apollone should hear you. He is the divo that makes all the music you hear on instruments—on harps and violins and pianos. He is very jealous of Divo Pan, and if he hears you praising him, will do something to you. You know what he did to King Mida, don't you?"

"What did he do?" asked Maria Dolores.

Annunziata stole another wary glance about.

"Once upon a time," she recounted, always in her lowest voice, "many years ago, hundreds of years ago, the King of this country was named Mida. And he loved very much the music of Divo Pan. He loved to sit by the river here, and to listen to the music of the water, and of the leaves, and of the birds. I love to do it too, and I think he was quite right. But one day, in his house, there came a musician with a harp, and began to play to him. And the King listened for a while, and then he told the musician to stop. 'Your music is very good,' he said, 'but now I am going into the fields and by the river, where I can hear a music I like better.' But the musician with the harp was really Divo Apollone himself; disguised. And this made him very angry and jealous. And to punish King Mida he changed his ears to long hairy ears, like an ass's. So, if you love the music of Divo Pan, you must be very careful not to let Divo Apollone hear you praise it, or he will do something to you."

And to drive home this application of her theme, she held up a warning finger.

Maria Dolores had listened, smiling. Now she gave a gay little laugh, and then for a moment mused. "That is a very curious bit of history," she said, in the end. "How ever did it come to your knowledge?"

Annunziata shrugged. "Oh," she answered, "everybody knows that. I have known it for years. My grandmother who lived in Milan told it to me. Doesn't the water look cool and pleasant?" was her abrupt digression, as she returned her gaze to the Rampio. "When it is hot like this, I should like to lie down in the water, and go to sleep. Wouldn't you?"

"I'm not so sure," said Maria Dolores. "I should rather fear I might be drowned."

"Oh, but that wouldn't hurt," said Annunziata, with security. "To be drowned in such beautiful green water, among all those beams of light, would be nice."

"Perhaps you are not aware," said Maria Dolores, "that when people are drowned they die?"

"Oh, yes, I know that," said Annunziata. "But"—she raised calm pellucid eyes—"wouldn't you like to die?"

"Certainly not," said Maria Dolores, a shadow on her face.

"I would," said Annunziata, stoutly. "It must be lovely to die."

"Hush," Maria Dolores rebuked her, frowning. "You must not say such things."

"Why not say them, if you think them?" asked Annunziata.

"You mustn't think them either," said Maria Dolores.

"Oh, I can't help thinking them," said Annunziata, with a movement. "It surely must be lovely to die and go to Heaven. If I were perfectly sure I should go to Heaven, I would shut my eyes and die now. But I should probably have to wait some time in Purgatory. And, of course, I might go to Hell."

Maria Dolores' face was full of trouble. "You must not talk like that," she said. "You must not. It is wicked of you."

"Then, if I am wicked, I should go to Hell?" inquired Annunziata, looking alertly up.

Maria Dolores looked about her, looked across the river, down the valley, as one in distress scanning the prospect for aid. "Of course you would not," she said. "My dear child, can't we find something else to talk of?"

"Do you think I shall have a very long and hard Purgatory?" asked Annunziata.

Maria Dolores threw a despairing glance at the horizon.

"No, no, dear," she answered uneasily. "You will have a very short and gentle one. Anyhow, you'll not have to consider that for years to come. Now shall we change the subject?"

"Well," said Annunziata, with an air of deliberation, "if you are perfectly sure I shall not go to Hell, and that my Purgatory will not be long and hard, I think I will do what I said. I will lie down in the water and go to sleep, and the water will drown me, and I shall die."

Maria Dolores' face was terrified. "Annunziata!" she cried. "You don't know what you are saying. You are cruel. You won't do anything of the sort. You must give me your solemn word of honour that you won't do anything of the sort. It would be a most dreadful sin. Come. Come with me now, away from here, away from the sight of the river. You must never come here alone again. Give me your hand, and come away."

Annunziata got up, gave her hand, and moved off at Maria Dolores' side, towards the Castle. "Of course," she said, "if I want to die, I don't need to lie down in the water. I can die at any moment I wish, by just shutting my eyes, and holding my breath, and telling my heart seven times to stop beating. Heart, stop beating; heart, stop beating;—that way, seven times."

"For the love of Mercy," wailed poor Maria Dolores, almost writhing in her misery.... Then, suddenly, she breathed a deep sigh of relief, and fervently exclaimed, "Thank God." John was advancing towards them, down the rugged pathway.

"Do please come and help me with this perverse and maddening child," she called to him, in English. "She's frightening me half out of my wits by threatening to die. She even threatened to drown herself in the Rampio."

"Children of her complexion can't die," said John, in Italian, (and Annunziata pricked up her ears). "They can only turn into monkeys, and then they have to live in the forests of Africa, where it is always dark, and all the men and women are negro savages, and all the other animals (except the mosquitos and the snakes) are lions and tigers. Besides, if Annunziata were to turn into a monkey, she couldn't have the sugared chestnuts that somebody or other has brought her from Roccadoro. On the chest of drawers in my room there has mysteriously appeared a box of sugared chestnuts. I thought they were for her, but they're not, unless she will promise never to turn into a monkey."

Annunziata's eyes had clouded.

"Of course I won't turn into a monkey," she said, in accents at once of disillusion and disdain. "I did not know there was any such danger. I should hate to be a monkey." Then her eyes brightened again. "May I go and get them now?" she asked, wistful and impatient.

"Yes," said John; "be off with you." And she went running lightly up the hill.

He turned to Maria Dolores. Her face (clear-cut, with its dark hair, against the red background of her sunshade) was white and drawn with pain. But she smiled, rather wanly, as her gaze met his, and said, in a weak voice, "Oh, I am so glad you came. I can't tell you how she was frightening me." And all at once her eyes filled with tears.

I needn't say whether John was moved, whether it was his impulse to take her in his arms and dry her tears with kisses. He did actually, on that impulse, give a perceptible start towards her, but then he restrained himself. "The child ought to be whipped," he broke out angrily. "You must not take her prattle so seriously."

"But she was so serious," said Maria Dolores. "Oh, when she threatened to lie down in the river, and let herself be drowned—!" Her voice failed her, as at the inexpressible.

"No fear of that," said John. "The first touch of the cold water (and icy-cold it is, a glacier-stream, you know) would bring her to her senses. But come! You must not think of it any more. You have had a bad shock, but no bones are broken, and now you must try to banish it all from your mind."

"What an unaccountable child she is!" said Maria Dolores. "Surely it is unnatural and alarming for a child to have her head so teeming with strange freaks and fancies. Oh, I pray God to grant that nothing may happen to her."

"The most serious evil that's likely to happen to her for the present," said John, "will be an indigestion of marrons glaces."

Maria Dolores' tears had gone now. She smiled. But afterwards she looked grave again. "Oh, I wish I could get the dread of something happening to her out of my heart. I wish she wasn't so pale and fragile-looking," she said. Then there came a gleam in her eyes. "But you were going for a walk, and I am detaining you."

"The object of my walk has been accomplished," said John.

"Oh?" questioned she.

"I was walking in the hope, on the chance, that I might meet you," he hardily explained. "It's such an age since I've seen you. Are you making for the garden? I pray you to be kind, and let me go with you. I've been an exile and a wanderer—I've been to Roccadoro."

She had rebegun her ascension of the hill. The path was steep, as well as rugged. Sometimes John had to help her over a hard bit. The touch of her hand, soft and warm, and firm too, in his; the sense of her closeness; the faint fragrance of her garments, of her hair,—these things, you may be sure, went to his head, went to his heart. The garden lay in a white blaze of sunshine, that seemed almost material, like an incandescent fluid; but the entrance to the avenue was dark and inviting. "Let us," he proposed, "go and sit on a marble bench under the glossy leaves of the ilexes, in the deep, cool shade; and let's play that it's a thousand years ago, and that you're a Queen (white Queen Blanche, like a queen of lilies), and that I'm your minstrel-man."

"What song will you sing me?" asked she gaily, as they took their places on the marble bench. It was semicircular, with a high carved back, (carved with the armorials of the Sforzas), and of course it was lichen-stained, grey and blue and green, yellow and scarlet.

"White Queen Blanche, like a queen of lilies, Fairer and dearer than dearest and fairest, To hear me sing, if it her sweet will is,— Sing, minstrel-man, of thy love, an thou darest,"

trolled John, in his light barytone, to a tune, I imagine, improvised for the occasion. "But if it's a thousand years ago," he laughed, "that song smacks too much perhaps of actuality, and I had best choose another."

Maria Dolores joined in his laugh. "I did not know you sang," she said. "Let me hear the other."

"A song," reflected he, "that I could sing with a good deal of feeling and conviction, would be 'Give her but the least excuse to love me.'"

Maria Dolores all at once looked sober.

"Oughtn't you to be careful," she said, "to give her no excuse at all to love you, if you are really resolved never to ask her to be your wife?"

"That is exactly what I have given her," answered John, "no excuse at all. I should sing in a spirit purely academic,—my song would be the utterance of a pious but hopeless longing, of the moth's desire for the star."

"But she, I suppose, isn't a star," objected Maria Dolores. "She's probably just a weak human woman. You may have given her excuses without meaning to." There was the slightest quaver in her voice.

John caught his breath; he turned upon her almost violently. But she was facing away from him, down the avenue, so that he could not get her eyes.

"In that case," she said, "wouldn't you owe her something?"

"I should owe myself a lifetime's penance with the discipline," John on a solemn tone replied, hungrily looking at her cheek, at the little tendrils of dark hair about her brow. "God knows what I should owe to her."

"You would owe it to her," said Maria Dolores, always facing away, "to tell her your love straightforwardly, and to ask her to marry you."

John thrilled, John ached. His blue eyes burned upon her. "What else do you think I dream of, night and day? But how could I, with honour? You know my poverty," he groaned.

"But if she has enough, more than enough, for two?" softly urged Maria Dolores.

"Ah, that's the worst of it," cried he. "If we were equals in penury, if she had nothing, then I might honourably ask her, and we could live on herbs together in a garret, and I could keep her respect and my own. Oh, garret-paradise! But to marry a woman who is rich, to live in luxury with her, and to try to look unconscious while she pays the bills,—she would despise me, I should abhor myself."

"Why should she despise you?" asked Maria Dolores. "The possession of wealth is a mere accident. If people are married and love each other, I can't see that it matters an atom whether their money belonged in the first place to the man or to the woman,—it would belong henceforward to them both equally."

"That is a very generous way of looking at it, but it is a woman's way. No decent man could accept it," said John.

"Up to a certain point," said Maria Dolores, slowly, "I understand your scruples. I understand that a poor man might feel that he would not like to make the advances, if the woman he loved was rich. But suppose the woman loved him, and knew that he loved her, and knew that it was only his poverty which held him back, then she might make the advances. She might put aside her pride, and go halfway to meet him, and to remove his difficulties and embarrassments. If, after that, he still did not ask her, I think his scruples would have become mere vanity,—I think it would show that he cared more for his mere vanity than for her happiness."

Her voice died out. John could see that her lip quivered a little. His throat was dry. The pulses were pounding in his temples. His brain was all a confusion. He hardly knew what had befallen him, he hardly knew what she had said. He only knew that there was a great ball of fire in his breast, and that the pain of it was half an immeasurable joy.

"God forgive me," the absurd and exaggerated stickler for the dignity of his sex wildly cried. "God knows how I love her, how I care for her happiness. But to go to her empty-handed,—but to put myself in the position of being kept by a woman,—God knows how impossible it is."

Maria Dolores stood up, still looking away from him.

"Well, let us hope," she said, changing her tone to one of unconcerned detachment, "that we have been discussing baseless suppositions. Let us hope that her heart is quite untouched. And for both your sakes," she concluded, her head in the air, "let us hope that you and she will never meet again. Good-bye."

She gave him a curt little nod, and walked lightly, rapidly up the avenue.

John's brain was all a confusion. He looked after her helplessly. He only knew that there was a great ball of fire in his breast, and that the pain of it was now unmixed.



V

Maria Dolores tripped into Frau Brandt's sitting-room, merrily singing a snatch of song.

"Gardez vous d'etre severe Quand on vous park d'amour,"

she carolled. Then she stopped singing, and blithely laughed.

Frau Brandt raised her good brown face from her knitting, and her good brown eyes looked anxiously upwards, slantwise over her tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles.

"What is the matter now?" she asked. "What has happened to vex you now?"

"To vex me!" cried Maria Dolores, in apparent astonishment. "Wasn't I singing aloud from sheer exuberance of high spirits?"

"No," said Frau Brandt, with a very positive shake of her white-capped head. "You were singing to conceal your low spirits. What has happened?"

"Ah, well, then, if you know so much and must know all," said Maria Dolores, "I've just proposed to the man I'm in love with, and been sent about my business."

"What do you mean?" asked Frau Brandt, phlegmatic. "What nonsense is this?"

"I mean my cobbler's son," Maria Dolores answered. "I, a Princess of the Empire, humbly offered him, a cobbler's son, my hand, heart, and fortune,—and the graceless man rejected them with scorn."

"That is a likely story," said Frau Brandt, wagging her chin. Her blunt brown fingers returned to their occupation. "I see your Serene Highness offering her hand."

"At all events, will you kindly tell Josephine to pack our boxes. To-morrow we'll be flitting," her Serene Highness in a casual way announced.

"What say you?" cried Frau Brandt, dropping her knitting into her lap.

"Yes—to Mischenau, to my brother," the Princess pursued. "Of course you'll have to come with us, poor dear. You can't let me travel alone with Josephine."

"No," said Frau Brandt. "I will go with you."

"And you can remain for my wedding," Maria Dolores added. "I am going home to meet my brother's wishes, and to marry my second cousin, the high and mighty Maximilian, Prince of Zelt-Zelt."

"Herr Gott!" said Frau Brandt, glancing with devotion at the ceiling.



VI

John, wild-eyed, was still where she had left him, in the avenue, savouring and resavouring his woe. "If only," he brooded, "she were of one's own rank in the world, then her wealth might perhaps not be such an absolutely hopeless impediment as it is. But to marry, as they say, beneath one, and to marry money into the bargain,—that would be a little too much like the fortune-hunter of tradition." He still sat where she had left him, on the marble bench, disconsolate, when the parroco approached hurriedly, from the direction of the house.

"Signore," the parroco began, out of breath, "I offer a thousand excuses for venturing to disturb you, but my niece has suddenly fallen ill. I am going to the village to telephone for a doctor. My cook is away, for her Sunday afternoon. Might I pray you to have the extreme kindness to stay with the child till I return? I don't know what is the matter, but she fainted, and now is delirious, and, I'm afraid, very ill indeed."

"Good Heavens!" gasped John, forgetting everything else. "Of course, of course."

And he set off hotfoot for the presbytery.



PART SIXTH



I

I would rather not dwell upon the details of Annunziata's illness. By the mercy of Providence, she got well in the end; but in the mean time those details were sufficiently painful. John, for example, found it more than painful to hear her cry out piteously, as she often would in her delirium, that she did not wish to be turned into a monkey; he hung his head and groaned, and cursed the malinspired moment which had given that chimaera birth. However, he had his compensations. Maria Dolores, whom he had thought never to see again, he saw every day. "Let us hope that you and she may never meet again." In his despairing heart the words became a refrain. But an hour later the news of trouble at the presbytery had travelled to the pavilion, and she flew straight to Annunziata's bedside. Ever since, (postponing those threatened nuptials at Mischenau), she had shared with John, and the parroco, and Marcella the cook, the labours of nurse. And though it was arranged that the men, turn and turn about, should watch by night, and the women by day, John, by coming early and leaving late, contrived to make a good part of his vigil and of hers coincident. And the strange result is that now, looking backwards upon that period of pain and dread, when from minute to minute no one knew what awful change the next minute might bring,—looking backwards, and seeing again the small bare room, cell-like, with its whitewashed walls, its iron cot, its Crucifix, its narrow window (through which wide miles of valley shone), and then the little white face and the brown curls tossing on the pillow, and the woman of his love sitting near to him, in the intimacy of a common care and common duties,—the strange result is that John feels a glow in his heart, as at the memory of a period of joy.

"Oh, do not let them turn me into a monkey. Oh, Holy Mother, I am so afraid. Oh, do not let them!" Annunziata cried, shuddering, and shrinking deeper into bed, towards the wall.

John hung his head and wrung his hands. "My God, my God!" he groaned.

"You should not blame yourself," Maria Dolores said in a low voice, while she bathed the child's forehead, and fanned her face. "Your intention was good, you could not foresee what has happened, and it may be for the best, after all,—it may strengthen her 'will to live,' which is the great thing, the doctor says."

She had spoken English, but Annunziata's next outcry was like a response.

"Oh, to live, to live—I want to live, to live Oh, let me live!"

But at other times her wandering thoughts took quite a different turn.

Gazing solemnly up into Maria Dolores' face, she said, "He does not even know her name, though he fears it may be Smitti. I thought it was Maria Dolores, but he fears it may be Smitti."

John looked out of the window, pretending not to hear, and praying, I expect, that Maria Dolores' eyes might be blinded and her counsel darkened. At the same time, (Heaven having sent me a laughing hero), I won't vouch that his shoulders didn't shake a little.



II

Apropos of their ignorance of each other's patronymics. ... One afternoon Maria Dolores was taking the air at the open door of the presbytery, when, to a mighty clattering of horses' hoofs, a big high-swung barouche came sweeping into the court-yard, described a bold half-circle, and abruptly drew up before her. In the barouche sat a big old lady, a big soft, humorous-eyed old lady, in cool crepe-de-chine, cream-coloured, with beautiful white hair, a very gay light straw bonnet, and a much befurbelowed lavender-hued sunshade. Coachman and footman, bolt upright, stared straight before them, as rigid as if their liveries were of papier-mache. The horses, with a full sense of what they owed to appearances, fierily champed their bits, tossed their manes, and pawed the paving-stones. The old lady smiled upon Maria Dolores with a look of great friendliness and interest, softly bowed, and wished her, in a fine, warm, old high-bred voice, "Good afternoon."

Maria Dolores (feeling an instant liking, as well as curiosity and admiration) smiled in her turn, and responded, "Good afternoon."

"You enjoy a fine view from here," the old lady remarked, ducking her sunshade in the direction of the valley.

"A beautiful view," agreed Maria Dolores, following the sunshade with her eyes.

Those of the stranger had a gleam. "But don't you think, if the unvarnished truth may be whispered, that it's becoming the merest trifle too hot?" she suggested.

Maria Dolores lightly laughed. "I think it is decidedly too hot," she said.

"I'm glad to find we're of the same opinion," declared the old lady, fanning herself. "You can positively see the heat vibrating there in the distance. We children of the North should fly such weather. For my part, I'm off to-morrow for England, where I can shiver through the summer comfortably in my chimney-corner."

Maria Dolores laughed out again.

"So I've driven over from Roccadoro," the newcomer continued, "to have a farewell look at a young man of my acquaintance who's staying here. I dare say you may know him. He has blue eyes and a red beard, a flattering manner and a pretty wit, and his name is Blanchemain."

"Oh?" said Maria Dolores, her eyebrows going up. "Is that his name? You mean the young Englishman who lives with the parroco?"

The old lady's eyebrows, which were thick and dark, went up too.

"Is it possible you didn't know his name?" was her surprised ejaculation. Then she said, "I wonder whether he is anywhere about?"

"I fancy he's asleep," said Maria Dolores.

"Asleep? At this hour?" The dark eyebrows frowned their protest. "That sounds like a sad slugabed."

Maria Dolores looked serious. "He was up all night. We have a child ill here, and he was up all night, watching."

The stranger's grey eyes filled with concern and sympathy. "I hope, I'm sure, it's not that pretty little girl, the niece of the parroco?" she said.

"Unhappily, it is," said Maria Dolores. "She has been very ill indeed."

"I am extremely sorry to hear it, extremely sorry," the old lady declared, with feeling. "If I can be of any sort of use—if I can send anything—or in any way help—" Her eyes completed the offer.

"Oh, thank you, thank you," replied Maria Dolores. "You are most kind, but I don't think there is anything any one can do. Besides, she is on the mend now, we hope. The doctor says the worst is probably over."

"Well, thank God for that," exclaimed the visitor, with a will. She considered for a moment, and then reverted to the previous question. "So you did not know that my vivid young friend's name was Blanchemain?"

"No," said Maria Dolores.

"It is a good name—there's none better in England," averred the old lady, with a nod of emphasis that set the wheat-ears in her bonnet quivering.

"Oh—?" said Maria Dolores, looking politely interested.

"He's the nephew and heir of Lord Blanchemain of Ventmere," her instructress went on. "That is one of our most ancient peerages."

"Really?" said Maria Dolores. (What else did she say in her heart? Where now was her cobbler's son?)

"And I'm glad to be able to add that I'm his sort of connection—I'm the widow of the late Lord Blanchemain." The lady paused; then, with that smile of hers which we know, that smile which went as an advance-guard to disarm resentment, "People of my age are allowed to be inquisitive," she premised. "I have introduced myself to you—won't you introduce yourself to me?"

"My name is Maria Dolores of Zelt-Neuminster," answered the person questioned, also smiling.

The widow of the late Lord Blanchemain inwardly gasped, but she was quick to suppress all outward symptoms of that circumstance. The daughter of Eve in her gasped, but the practised old Englishwoman of the world affably and imperturbably pronounced, with a gracious movement of the head, "Ah, indeed? You are then, of course, a relation of the Prince?"

"I am the Prince's sister," said Maria Dolores. And, as if an explanation of her presence was in order, she added, "I am here visiting my old nurse and governess, to whom my brother has given a pavilion of the Castle for her home."

Lady Blanchemain fanned herself. "A miller's daughter!" she thought, with a silent laugh at John's expense and her own. "I am very glad to have made your acquaintance," she said, "and I hope this may not be our last meeting. I'm afraid I ought now to be hastening back to Roccadoro. I wonder whether you will have the kindness, when you see him, to convey my parting benediction to Mr. Blanchemain. Oh, no, I would not let him be wakened, not for worlds. Thank you. Good-bye."

And with a great effect of majesty and importance, like a conscious thing, her carriage rolled away.



III

"My romance is over, my April dream is ended," said the Princess, with an air, perhaps a feint, of listless melancholy, to Frau Brandt.

"What mean you?" asked Frau Brandt, unmoved.

"My cobbler's son has disappeared—has vanished in a blaze of glory," her Serene Highness explained, and laughed.

"I don't understand," said Frau Brandt. "He has not left Sant' Alessina?"

"No, but he isn't a cobbler's son at all—he's merely been masquerading as one—his name is not Brown, Jones, or Robinson—his name is the high-sounding name of Blanchemain, and he's heir to an English peerage."

"Ah, so? He is then noble?" Frau Brandt inferred, raising her eyes, with satisfaction.

"As noble as need be. An English peer is marriageable. So here's adieu to my cottage in the air."

"Here's good riddance to it," said Frau Brandt.

That evening, at the hour of sunset, Maria Dolores met John in the garden.

"You had a visitor this afternoon," she announced. "A most inspiritingly young old lady, as soft and white as a powder-puff, in a carriage that was like a coach-and-four. Lady Blanchemain. She is leaving to-morrow for England. She desired me to give you her farewell blessing."

"It will be doubly precious to me by reason of the medium through which it comes," said John, with his courtliest obeisance.

There was a little pause, during which she looked at the western sky. But presently, "Why did you tell me you had an uncle who was a farmer?" she asked, beginning slowly to pace down the pathway.

"Did I tell you that? I suppose I had a boastful fit upon me," John replied.

"But it very much misled me," said Maria Dolores.

"Oh, it's perfectly true," said John.

"You are the heir to a peerage," said Maria Dolores.

John had a gesture.

"There you are," he said; "and my uncle, the peer, spends much of his time and most of his money breeding sheep and growing turnips. If that isn't a farmer, I should like to know what is."

"I hope you displayed less reticence regarding your station in the world to that woman you were in love with," said she.

"That woman I was in love with?" John caught her up. "That woman I am in love with, please."

"Oh? Are you still in love with her?" Maria Dolores wondered. "It is so long since you have spoken of her, I thought your heart was healed."

"If I have not spoken of her, it has been because I was under the impression that you had tacitly forbidden me to do so," John informed her.

"So I had," she admitted. "But I find that there is such a thing—as being too well obeyed."

She brought out her last words, after the briefest possible suspension, hurriedly, in a voice that quailed a little, as if in terror of its own audacity. John, with tingling pulses, turned upon her. But she, according to her habit at such times, refused him her eyes. He could see, though, that her eyelashes trembled.

"Oh," he cried, "I love her so much, I need her so, I suppose I shall end by doing the dishonourable thing."

"Did you ever tell her that you were Lord Blanchemain's heir?" she asked.

"I never thought of it. Why should I?" said John.

"When you were bemoaning your poverty, as an obstacle to marriage, you might have remembered that your birth counted for something. With us Austrians, for example, birth counts for almost everything,—for infinitely more than money."

"I think," said John, as one impersonally generalizing, "that a fortune-hunter with a tuft is the least admirable variety of that animal. I wish you could see what beautiful little rose-white ears she has, and the lovely way in which her dark hair droops about them."

"How long ago was it," mused she, "that love first made people fancy they saw beauties which had no real existence?"

"Oh, the moment you see a thing, it acquires real existence," John returned. "The act of seeing is an act of creation. The thing you see has real existence on your retina and in your mind, if nowhere else, and that is the realest sort of real existence."

"Then she must thank you as the creator of her 'rose-white' ears," laughed Maria Dolores. "I wonder whether that sunset has any real existence, and whether it is really as splendid as it seems."

The west had become a vast sea of gold, a pure and placid sea of many-tinted gold, bounded and intersected and broken into innumerable wide bays and narrow inlets by great cloud-promontories, purple and rose and umber. Directly opposite, just above the crest-line of the hills, hung the nearly full moon, pale as a mere phantom of itself. And from somewhere in the boscage at the garden's end came a lool-lool-lool-lioo-lio, deep and long-drawn, liquid and complaining, which one knew to be the preliminary piping-up of Philomel.

"If some things," said John, "derive their beauty from the eye of the beholder, the beauty of other things is determined by the presence or absence of the person you long to share all beautiful visions with. The sky, the clouds, the whole air and earth, this evening, seem to me beauty in its ultimate perfection."

Maria Dolores softly laughed, softly, softly. And for a long time, by the marble balustrade that guarded this particular terrace of the garden, they stood in silence. The western gold burned to red, and more sombre red; the cloud-promontories gloomed purpler; the pale moon kindled, and shone like ice afire, with its intense cold brilliancy; the olive woods against the sky lay black; a score of nightingales, near and far, were calling and sobbing and exulting; and two human spirits yearned with the mystery of love.

"My income," said John, all at once, brusquely coming to earth, "is exactly six hundred pounds a year. I suppose two people could live on that, though I'm dashed if I see how. Of course we couldn't live in England, where that infernal future peerage would put us under a thousand obligations; but I dare say we might find a garret here in Italy. The question is, would she be willing, or have I any right to ask her, to marry me, on the condition of leaving her own money untouched, and living with me on mine?

"Apropos of future peerages and things," said Maria Dolores, "do you happen to know whether she has any rank of her own to keep up?"

"I don't care twopence about her rank," said John.

"Do you happen to know her name?" she asked.

"I know what I wish her name was," John promptly answered. "I wish to Heaven it was Blanchemain."

Maria Dolores gazed, pensive, at the moon. "He does not even know her name," she remarked, on a key of meditation, "though he fears," she sadly shook her head, "he fears it may be Smitti."

"Oh, I say!" cried John, wincing, with a kind of sorry giggle; and I don't know whether he looked or felt the more sheepish. His face showed every signal of humiliation, he tugged nervously at his beard, but his eyes, in spite of him, his very blue blue eyes were full of vexed amusement.

The bell in the clock-tower struck eight.

"There—it is your hour for going to Annunziata," said Maria Dolores.

"You have not answered my question?" said John.

"I will think about it," said she.



IV

Annunziata's delirium had passed, but in spite of all their efforts to persuade her not to talk, talk she would.

"This is the month of May, isn't it?" she asked, next morning.

"Yes, dear one," said Maria Dolores, whose watch it was.

"And that is the month of Mary. San Luca ought to hurry up and make me well, so that I can keep flowers on the Lady Altar."

"Then if you wish to get well quickly," said Maria Dolores, "you must try not to talk,—nor even to think, if you can help it. You know the doctor does not want you to talk."

"All right. I won't talk. A going clock may be always wrong, but a stopped clock is right twice a day. So stop your tongue, and avoid folly. My uncle told me that. He never talks."

"And now shall you and I imitate his example?" proposed Maria Dolores. Her lips, compressed, were plainly the gaolers of a laugh.

"Yes," said Annunziata. "But I can't help thinking of those poor flowers. All May flowers are born to be put on the Lady Altar. Those poor flowers are missing what they were born for. They must be very sad."

"This afternoon, every afternoon," Maria Dolores promised, "I will put flowers on the Lady Altar. Now see if you can't shut your eyes, and rest for a little while."

"I once found a toad on the Lady Altar. What do you think he was there for?" asked Annunziata.

"I can't think, I'm sure," said Maria Dolores.

"Well, when I first saw him I was angry, and I was going to get a broom and sweep him away. But then I thought it must be very hard to be a toad, and that you can't help being a toad if you are born one, and I thought that perhaps that toad was there praying that he might be changed from a toad to something else. So I didn't sweep him away. Have you ever heard of the little Mass of Corruption that lay in a garden?"

"No," said Maria Dolores.

"Well," said Annunziata, "once upon a time a little Mass of Corruption lay in a garden. But it did not know it was a Mass of Corruption, and it did not wish to be a Mass of Corruption, and it never did any harm or wished any harm to any one, but just lay there all day long, and thought how beautiful the sky was, and how good and warm the sun, and how sweet the flowers were and the bird-songs, and thanked God with all its heart for having given it such a lovely place to lie in. Yet all the while, you know, it couldn't help being what it was, a little Mass of Corruption. And at the close of the day some people who were walking in the garden saw it, and cried out, 'Oh, what a horrible little Mass of Corruption!' and they called the gardener, and had it buried in the earth. But the little Mass of Corruption, when it heard that it was a little Mass of Corruption, felt very, very sad, and it made a supplication to Our Lady. 'I do not wish to be a Mass of Corruption,' it said. 'Queen of Heaven, pray for me, that I may be purified, and made clean, and not be a Mass of Corruption any longer, and that I may then go back to the garden, out of this dark earth.' So Our Lady prayed for it, and it was cleansed with water and purified, and—what do you think the Little Mass of Corruption became? It became a rose—a red rose in that very garden, just where they had buried it. From which we see—But I don't quite remember what we see from it," she broke off the pain of baffled effort on her brow. "My uncle could tell you that."

Afterwards, for a few minutes, she was silent, lying quite still, with her eyes on the ceiling.

"Why do sunny lands produce dark people, and dark lands light people?" she asked all at once.

"Ah, don't begin to talk again, dear," Maria Dolores pleaded. "The doctor will he coming soon now, and he will be angry if he finds that I have let you talk."

"Oh, I will tell him that it isn't your fault," said Annunziata. "I will tell him that you didn't let me, but that I talked because it is so hard to lie here and think, think, think, and not be allowed to say what you are thinking. Prospero asked me that question about sunny lands a long time ago. I've been thinking and thinking, but I can't think it out. Have you a great deal of money? Are you very rich?"

"Darling, won't you please not talk any more?" Maria Dolores implored her.

"I'll stop pretty soon," said Annunziata. "I think you are very rich. I think, in spite of his saying her name is not Maria Dolores, that you are the dark woman whom Prospero is to marry. He is to marry a dark woman who will be very rich. But then he will also he very rich himself. Is Austria a sunny land? England must be a dark land, for Prospero is light. Let me see your left hand, please, and I will tell you whether you are to marry a light man.

"Hush!" said Maria Dolores, trying not to laugh. "That shall be some other time."

"Wouldn't you like to marry Prospero? I would," said Annunziata.

"I think I hear the wheels of the doctor's gig," said Maria Dolores. "Now we shall both be scolded."

"But of course, if you do marry him, I can't," Annunziata pursued, undaunted by this menace. "A man isn't allowed to have two wives,—unless he is a king. He may have two sisters or two daughters, but not two wives or two mothers. There was once a king named Salomone who had a thousand wives, but even he had only one mother, I think. I hope you will live at Sant' Alessina after your marriage. Will you?"

Maria Dolores bit her lip and vouchsafed no answer; and again for a minute or two Annunziata lay silent. But presently, "Have you ever waked up in the middle of the night, and felt terribly frightened?" she asked.

"Yes, dear, sometimes. I suppose every one has," said Maria Dolores.

"Well, do you know why people feel so frightened when they wake like that?" pursued the child.

"No," said Maria Dolores.

"I do," said Annunziata. "The middle of the night is the Devil's Noon. Nobody is awake in the middle of the night except wicked people, like thieves or roysterers, or people who are suffering. All people who are good, and who are well and happy, are sound asleep. So it is the time the Devil likes best, and he and all his evil spirits come to the earth to enjoy the great pleasure of seeing people wicked or suffering. And that is why we feel so frightened when we wake. The air all round us is full of evil spirits, though we can't see them, and they are watching us, to run and tell the Devil if we do anything wicked or suffer any pain. But it is foolish of us to feel frightened, because our Guardian Angels are always there too, and they are a hundred times stronger than the evil spirits. Angels, you know, are very big, very much bigger than men. Some of them are as tall as mountains, but even the quite small ones are as tall as trees."

"This time I really do hear wheels," said Maria Dolores, with an accent of thanksgiving.

And she rose to meet the doctor.



V

John sat in his room, absorbed in contemplation of a tiny lace-edged pocket-handkerchief. He spread it out upon his knee, and laughed. He crumpled it up in his palm, and pressed it to his face, and drank deep of its faint perfume,—faint, but powerfully provocative of visions and emotions. He had found it during the night on the floor of the sick-room, and had captured and borne it away like a treasure. He spread it out on his knee again, and was again about to laugh at its small size and gauzy texture, when his eye was caught by something in its corner. He held it nearer to the window. The thing that had caught his eye was a cypher surmounted by a crown, embroidered so minutely as almost to call for a magnifying glass. But without a glass he could see that the cypher was composed of the initials M and D, and that the crown was not a coronet, but a closed crown, of the pattern worn by mediatised princes.

"What on earth can be the meaning of this?" he wondered, frowning, and breathing quick.

But he was stopped from further speculation for the moment by a knock at the door. The postman entered with two letters, for one of which, as it was registered, John had to sign. When he had tipped the postman and was alone again, he put his registered letter on the dressing-table (with a view to disciplining curiosity and exercising patience, possibly) and turned his attention to the other. In a handsome, high old hand, that somehow reminded him of the writer's voice, it ran as follows:—

"DEAR JOHN,

"I was heart-broken not to see you when I drove over to say good-bye this afternoon, but chance favoured me at least to the extent of letting me see your miller's daughter, and you may believe that I was glad of an opportunity to inspect her at close quarters. My dear boy, she is no more a miller's daughter than you are. Her beauty—there's race in it. Her manner and carriage, her voice, accent, her way of dressing, (I'd give a sovereign for the name of her dressmaker), the fineness of her skin, her hair, everything—there's race in 'em all, race and consciousness of race, pride, dignity, distinction. These things don't come to pass in a generation. I'm surprised at your lack of perspicacity. And those blue eyes of yours look so sharp, too. But perhaps your wish was father to your thought. You felt (well, and so to some extent did I) that it would be more romantic. She's probably a very great swell indeed, and I expect the Frau What's-her-name she's staying with will turn out to be her old governess or nurse or something. When those Austrians can show quarterings, (of course you must bar recent creations—they're generally named Cohen), they can show them to some effect. They think nothing of thirty-two. All of which, au fond, rather rejoices me, for if she really had been a miller's daughter, it would have seemed a good deal like throwing yourself away, and who knows what your rusty, crusty old uncle B. might have said? I've long had a rod in pickle for him, and t'other day I applied it. Attendez.

"Don't forget the pig you purchased—so gallantly and confidingly. I would not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments—your pig will gobble 'em up. You should by this have received a communication from my solicitors. Remember, you have pledged your sacred promise. There must be no question of trying to shirk or burke it. Remember that I am quite outrageously rich. I have no children of my own, and no very near relatives, (and my distant ones are intensely disagreeable), and I can't help looking upon the heir of the Blanchemains as a kind of spiritual son. In your position there's no such thing as having too much money. Take all that comes, and never mind the quarter whence. They're Plymouth Brethren, and send me tracts.

"Good-bye now till August, if not before. For of course in August you must come to me at Fring. Will you bring your bride? When and where the wedding? I suppose they'll want it in Austria. Beware of long engagements—or of too short ones. The autumn's the time,—the only pretty ring-time. You see, you'll need some months for the preparation of your trousseau. I love a man to be smart. Well, good-bye. I was so sorry about that child's illness, but thankful to hear she was mending.

"Yours affectionately,

"LINDA BLANCHEMAIN."

And his registered letter, when at last he opened it, ran thus:—

"DEAR SIR:—Pursuant to instructions received from our client Lady Blanchemain, we beg to hand you herewith our cheque for Seven hundred and fifty pounds (L750 stg.), and to request the favour of your receipt for the same, together with the address of your bankers, that we may pay in quarterly a like sum to your account, it being her ladyship's intention, immediately upon her return to England, to effect a settlement upon yourself and heirs of L100,000 funded in Bk. of Eng. stock.

"We are further to have the pleasure to inform you that by the terms of a will just prepared by us, and to be executed by Lady Blanchemain at the earliest possible date, you are constituted her residuary legatee.