It wanted but a few days now to their parting. Miss Dorothy had taken Delfina to Sienna, and then returned to help her mistress in the last and most trying arrangements and to accompany her on the journey. In the mother's house in Sienna the truth of the story was not known, and Delfina of course knew nothing. Maria had merely written that Don Manuel had been suddenly recalled by his government. And she made ready to go—to leave these rooms, so full of cherished things, to the hands of the public auctioneers who had already drawn up the inventory and fixed the date of the sale for the 20th of June, at ten in the morning.

On the evening of the 9th, as she was leaving Andrea, she missed a glove. While looking for it she came upon a volume of Shelley, the one which Andrea had lent her in Schifanoja, the dear and affecting book in which, before the excursion to Vicomile, she had underlined the words

She took up the book with visible emotion and turned over the pages till she came to the one which bore the mark of her underlining.

'Never!' she murmured with a shake of the head. 'You remember? And hardly eight months have passed since.'

She pensively turned over a few more leaves and read other verses.

'He is our poet,' she went on. 'How often you promised to take me to the English Cemetery! You remember, we were to take flowers for his grave. Shall we go? You might take me before I leave. It will be our last walk together.'

'Let us go to-morrow,' he answered.

The next evening, when the sun was already declining, they went in a closed carriage; on her knees lay a bunch of roses. They drove along the foot of the leafy Aventino and caught a glimpse of the boats laden with Sicilian wine anchored in the port of Ripa Grande.

In the neighbourhood of the cemetery they left the carriage and went the rest of the way to the gates on foot and in silence. At the bottom of her heart, Maria felt that not only was she here to lay flowers on the tomb of a poet, but that in this place of death she would weep for something of herself irreparably lost. A Fragment of Shelley, read in the sleepless watches of the night echoed through her spirit as she gazed at the cypresses pointing to the sky on the other side of the white wall.

As she passed through the gateway she put her arm through Andrea's and shivered.

The cemetery was solitary and deserted. A few gardeners were engaged in watering the plants along by the wall, swinging their watering-cans from side to side with an even and continuous motion and in silence.

The funeral cypresses stood up straight and motionless in the air; only their tops, gilded by the sun, trembled lightly. Between the rigid, greenish-black trunks rose the white tombs—square slabs of stone, broken pillars, urns, sarcophagi. From the sombre mass of the cypresses fell a mysterious shadow, a religious peace, a sort of human kindness, as limpid and beneficent waters gush from the hard rock. The unchanging regularity of the trees and the chastened whiteness of the sepulchral monuments affected the spirit with a sense of solemn and sweet repose. But between the stiff ranks of the trees, standing in line like the deep pipes of an organ, and interspersed among the tombs, graceful oleanders swayed their tufts of pink blossom; roses dropped their petals at every light touch of the breeze, strewing the ground with their fragrant snow; the eucalyptus shook its pale tresses—now dark, now silvery white; willows wept over the crosses and crowns; and, here and there, the cactus displayed the glory of its white blooms like a swarm of sleeping butterflies or an aigrette of wonderful feathers. The silence was unbroken save by the cry, now and then, of some solitary bird.

Andrea pointed to the top of the hill.

'The poet's tomb is up there,' he said, 'near that ruin to the left, just below the last tower.'

She dropped his arm and went on in front of him through the narrow paths bordered with low myrtle hedges. She walked as if fatigued, turning round every few minutes to smile back at her lover. She was dressed in black and wore a black veil that cast over her faint and trembling smile a shadow of mourning. Her oval chin was paler and purer than the roses she carried in her hand.

Once, as she turned, one of the roses shed its petals on the path. Andrea stooped to pick them up. She looked at him and he fell on his knees before her.

'Adorata!' he exclaimed.

A scene rose up before her, vividly as a picture.

'You remember,' she said, 'that morning at Schifanoja when I threw a handful of leaves down to you from the higher terrace? You bent your knee to me while I descended the steps. I do not know how it is, but that time seems to me so near and yet so far away! I feel as if it had happened yesterday, and then again, a century ago. But perhaps, after all it only happened in a dream.'

Passing along between the low myrtle hedges, they at last reached the tower near which lies the tomb of the poet and of Trelawny. The jasmin climbing over the old ruin was in flower, but of the violets nothing was left but their thick carpet of leaves. The tops of the cypresses, which here just reached the line of vision, were vividly illumined by the last red gleams of the sun as it sank behind the black cross of the Monte Testaccio. A great purple cloud edged with burning gold sailed across the sky in the direction of the Aventino—

Maria repeated the last line. Then, moved by a delicate inspiration—'Please unfasten my veil,' she said to Andrea.

She leaned her head back slightly so that he might untie the knot, and Andrea's fingers touched her hair—that magnificent hair, in the dense shadow of which he had so often tasted all the delights of his perfidious imagination, evoked the image of her rival.

'Thank you,' she said.

She then drew the veil from before her face and looked at Andrea with eyes that were a little dazed. She looked very beautiful. The shadows round her eyes were darker and deeper, but the eyes themselves burned with a more intense light. Her hair clung to her temples in heavy hyacinthine curls tinged with violet. The middle of her forehead, which was left free, gleamed, by contrast, in moonlike purity. Her features had fined down and lost something of their materiality through stress of love and sorrow.

She wound the veil about the stems of the roses, tied the two ends together with much care, and then buried her face in the flowers, inhaling their perfume. Then she laid them on the simple stone that bears the poet's name engraved upon it. There was an indefinable expression in the gesture, which Andrea could not understand.

As they moved away, he suddenly stopped short, and looking back towards the tower, 'How did you manage to get those roses?' he asked.

She smiled, but her eyes were wet.

'They are yours—those of that snowy night—they have bloomed again this evening. Do you not believe it?'

The evening breeze was rising, and behind the hill the sky was overspread with gold, in the midst of which the purple cloud dissolved, as if consumed by fire. Against this field of light, the serried ranks of the cypresses looked more imposing and mysterious than before. The Psyche at the end of the middle avenue seemed to flush with pale tints as of flesh. A crescent moon rose over the pyramid of Cestius, in a deep and glassy sky, like the waters of a calm and sheltered bay.

They went through the centre avenue to the gates. The gardeners were still watering the plants, and two other men held a velvet and silver pall by the two ends, and were beating it vigorously, while the dust rose high and glittered in the air.

From the Aventine came the sound of bells.

Maria clung to her lover's arm, unable to control her anguish, feeling the ground give way beneath her feet, her life ebb from her at every step. Once inside the carriage, she burst into a passion of tears, sobbing despairingly on her lover's shoulder.

'I shall die!'

But she did not die. Better a thousand times for her that she had!