Maria asked her friend Giuliana Parenzo to lunch with her the next day. If Baldassare Castiglione came at three o’clock, and if it seemed wiser not to refuse him the door outright, he should at least not find her alone.

The Countess occupied one floor of a rather small house in the broad Via San Martino, near the railway station. It was a sunny apartment, furnished very simply but very prettily. After her husband had left her she had declined to accept any allowance from him and had moved out of the old palace, in which the state apartment was now shut up, while the rest of the great building was now occupied by a cardinal, an insurance company, and a rich Chicago widow. Maria lived on her own fortune, which was not large, but was enough, as she had been an only child and both her parents were dead.

Giuliana sat on her right at the small square table, and on her left was seated a sturdy boy over eight years old, and lately promoted to sailor’s clothes. Why are all boys now supposed to go to sea between six and eight or nine, or even until ten and twelve?

Leone was a handsome child. He had thick brown hair and a fair complexion; his bright blue eyes flashed when he was in a rage, as he frequently was, and his jaw was already square and strong. Maria was the only person who could manage him, and was apparently the only one to whom he could become attached. He behaved very well with Giuliana Parenzo; but though she did her best to make him fond of her, she was quite well aware that she never succeeded in obtaining anything more from him than a kind of amusing boyish civility and polite toleration. As for nurses, he had made the lives of several of them so miserable that they would not stay in the house, and Maria had now emancipated him from women, greatly to his delight. He submitted with a tolerably good grace to being dressed and taken to walk by a faithful old man-servant who had been with Maria’s father before she had been born. He was not what is commonly known as a ‘naughty boy’; he spoke the truth fearlessly, and did not seek delight in torturing animals or insects; but his independence and his power of resistance, passive and active, were amazing for such a small boy, and he seemed not to understand what danger was. Maria did not remember that he had ever cried, either, even when he was in arms. Altogether, at the age of eight, Leone di Montalto was a personage with whom it was necessary to reckon.

Maria knew that she loved him almost to the verge of weakness, but she would not have been the woman she was if she had been carried beyond that limit. He was all she had left in life, and so far as lay in her she meant that he should be a Christian gentleman. Nature seemed to have made him without fear; and Maria would have him reach a man’s estate without reproach. It was not going to be easy, but she was determined to succeed. It was the least she could do to atone for her one great fault.

Without reproach he should grow up, for his very being was a reproach to her. That was the bitterest thing in her lonely existence, that the sight of what she loved best, and in the best way, should always remind her of the blot in her own life, of that moment of half-consenting weakness when she had been at the mercy of a desperate, daring, ruthless man whom she could not help loving. It was cruel that her only great consolation, the one living creature on whom she had a right to bestow every care and thought of her loving heart, should for ever call up the vision of her one and only real sin.

There were moments when the mother’s devotion to her child felt like a real temptation, when she asked herself in self-torment whether it was all for the boy alone, or whether some part of it was not for that which should never be, for what she had fought so hard to thrust out of her heart since the day when she had married Montalto, seven years ago. For she had loved Castiglione even then, and before that, when she had been barely seventeen and he but twenty, and they had danced together one autumn evening at the Villa Montalto, at a sort of party that had not been considered a real party, and to which her mother had taken her because she wished to go to it herself, or perhaps because she wanted Montalto to see her pretty daughter and fall in love with her before she was out of the schoolroom.

And that was what had happened. It had all been fated from the first. On that very night Montalto fell in love with her, and she with Baldassare del Castiglione, whom she had called Balduccio, and who had called her Maria, ever since they had known each other as little children. On that night she had felt that he was a man, and no longer a boy. It was the first time she had seen him in his new officer’s uniform, for it was not a week since he had got his commission. But she had hardly known Montalto, who had been brought up much more in Spain and Belgium than in Rome, because his mother was Spanish and his father had been a block of the old school, who feared the (godless) education of modern Italy.

Giuliana Parenzo was a year or two older than Maria, and the latter had felt for her the boundless admiration which very young girls sometimes have for those slightly older ones in whom they see their ideals. Giuliana had been a thoroughly good girl, had married happily, was a thoroughly good wife, and was the conscientious mother of five children; but she was very far from being the saintly heroine her friend’s imagination had made of her.

She was morally lucky. Without in the least depreciating the intrinsic value of her virtue, it is quite fair to ask what she might have done if she had ever been placed in the same situation as her friend. But this never happened to her, though she was apparently not without those gifts and qualities that suggest enterprise on the part of admirers. She had been a very pretty girl, and in spite of much uneventful happiness and five children she was considered to be a beautiful woman at nine-and-twenty; and, moreover, she was extremely smart. In looks she was not at all like a rigid Roman matron.

But temptation had not come her way; it had passed by on the other side, and she could hardly understand how it could exist for others, since it certainly had never existed for her. There are people who go through life without accidents; they cross the ocean in utterly rotten steamers without knowing of the danger, they travel in the last train that runs before the one that is wrecked, they go out in high-speed motors with rash amateur chauffeurs who are killed the very next day, they leave the doomed city on the eve of the great earthquake, and the theatre five minutes before the fire breaks out.

Similarly, there are women who are morally so lucky that an accident to their souls is almost an impossibility. Giuliana Parenzo was one of them, and Maria’s affection gave her credit for strength because she had never faced a storm. Not that it mattered much, after all. The important thing was that Maria, even at the worst crisis of her young life, had always looked upon her spotless friend as her guide and her ideal. Yet there had been a time when it would have been only too easy for her to look another way.

To-day Maria had turned to Giuliana naturally in her difficulty. It was hardly a trouble yet, but Castiglione’s return and his intended visit were the first incidents that had disturbed her outwardly peaceful life in all the seven years that had passed since her husband had left Rome. The rest had been within her.

It would not last long. Castiglione had said that he had only a fortnight’s leave, and with the most moderate desire to avoid him, she need not meet him more than two or three times while he was in Rome. To refuse to receive him once would perhaps look to him like fear or weakness, and she believed that she was strong and brave; yet she did not wish to see him alone, not because she was afraid of him, but because to be alone with him a few moments, even as she had been yesterday afternoon, brought the past too near, and it hurt her.

Giuliana often lunched with her friend, and was far from suspecting that she had been asked for a special reason to-day. The two talked of indifferent matters, much as usual, and presently went into the drawing-room. It was warm already, and the blinds were closed to keep out the blazing sunlight and the reflection from the white street. The friends sat near each other, exchanging a few words now and then, and both were preoccupied, which hindered each from noticing that the other was so.

Leone knelt on a chair at the window looking down into the street between the slits of the green blinds.

‘Summer is coming!’ he suddenly called out, turning to look at his mother.

‘Yes,’ she answered, smiling at him merely because he spoke. ‘It will come soon.’

‘But do you know why? There are two bersaglieri in linen trousers.’

‘Yes, dear. They have probably been drilling.’

‘No,’ answered the small boy. ‘They have no knapsacks and no rifles, and they are not dusty. It is because summer is coming that they wear linen trousers. I can’t see them any more. They walk so fast, you know. When shall I be a bersagliere, mama?’

‘Would you not rather be a sailor?’ asked Giuliana.

‘Oh, no!’ Leone laughed. ‘A sailor? To sit inside an iron box and shoot off guns at other iron boxes? That’s not fighting! But the bersaglieri, they charge the enemy and kill them with their bayonets. And sometimes they are killed themselves. But that doesn’t matter, for they have had the glory!’

‘What glory?’ inquired Maria, watching the small boy’s flashing eyes.

‘They kill the enemies of Italy,’ he answered. ‘That’s glory!’

He turned to look through the blinds again, doubtless in the hope of seeing more soldiers.

‘Your son certainly has a warlike disposition, my dear,’ laughed Giuliana.

But Maria did not laugh; on the contrary, she looked rather grave.

‘All boys want to be soldiers,’ she answered. ‘I’m sure yours do, too!’

‘No,’ said Giuliana, rising. ‘My boys are almost too peaceable! I sometimes wish they had more of Leone’s spirit!’

Maria looked at her thoughtfully, thinking at first of what she had said, but suddenly realised that she had left her seat.

‘You are not going already?’ Maria cried in real anxiety.

‘Yes, dear, I must. It’s a quarter past two, and I have to allow five minutes for driving to the Quirinal.’

‘You did not tell me that you had an audience to-day,’ said Maria, deeply disappointed. ‘I’m so sorry! I had hoped you would stay with me, and that we might go out together by and by. How long shall you be there? Can you not come directly back?’

Giuliana was a little surprised; she shook her head doubtfully.

‘I’ll try to come back, but I really have not the least idea how long I may be kept. You see, it’s a special audience to talk about my working women’s institute, and I have so much to say. I really must be going, dear!’

She glanced again at her little watch, which was fastened high up on the close-fitting dove-coloured body of her frock by a little jade bar carved to imitate the twist of a rope, and just then the very latest invention in the way of indispensable nothings. Giuliana, without the least coquetry and with very little vanity as to her appearance, always seemed to have everything new just a week sooner than any one else. The truth was that her husband was in love with her, and likely to remain so, and as he had spent a good deal of his youth in women’s society, he thoroughly understood such matters; and he superintended the docile and pretty Giuliana’s toilet with quite as much care as he gave to the direction of his subordinates, though he was Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, with a very promising future before him and a good deal to do.

Giuliana kissed her friend on both cheeks and said good-bye to Leone, who did not like to be kissed at all, and in a moment she was gone.

Maria went to the window where the boy was, and, resting one hand on his shoulder, she bent down beside him and looked through the blinds.

‘Have you seen any more soldiers?’ she asked, after a moment, and as if the question were an important one.

‘Only two,’ he answered. ‘They’re all at dinner now. It’s the time.’

Her face was close to the child’s as she looked out with him; and just then he moved his head and his short and thick brown hair brushed her cheek. She started a little nervously and stood upright, looking down at the top of his head.

‘What is it, mama?’ he asked without taking his eyes from the blinds, for just then he saw an officer of the Piedmont Lancers crossing the street, and the beautiful uniform of that regiment was always an especially delightful sight.

‘Nothing, darling,’ answered Maria.

As she looked at the short and thick brown hair it seemed to draw her to it, and she bent slowly, as if she were going to kiss it. But at that very moment, when her lips were quite near it, her eyes could see through the blinds, and she caught sight of the officer before he disappeared.

She drew back and quickly covered her lips with her hand, as if to put it between her mouth and her child’s head. Castiglione had been in the Piedmont Lancers before he had exchanged, and the uniform was the one he had worn when he had first danced with her at the Villa Montalto, and afterwards, when he had first dined with her and her husband, and later again, and the last time she had seen him before he had gone away. The handsome dress was associated with all her life.

She crossed the room quickly and rang a bell, and waited a moment, listening for the servant. She would say that she did not receive, no matter who came. Then she heard footsteps outside the drawing-room door, and it opened wide and Agostino, the old butler, announced a visitor.

‘Il Signor Conte del Castiglione.’

When Baldassare entered the room a moment later, Leone had left the window and was at his mother’s side, holding her hand and eyeing the man he had never seen, and whose name he had never heard, with a boy’s boldly inquiring stare; and the blue eyes of the man and of the child met for the first time.

‘I came early,’ said Castiglione as he advanced, ‘for I was afraid you might be going to the races.’

‘No,’ Maria answered, steadying herself by the table, ‘I am not going to the races to-day.’

He held out his hand, and she could not well refuse to take it, before Leone; its touch was quiet and respectful, and only lasted an instant, but it was even colder than her own.

‘And this is your son,’ he said, in a rather muffled voice, and he shook hands with the lad. ‘I’m glad to see you,’ he said. ‘I knew your mother long before you were born, and we were good friends. But I have been away all these years. That is the reason why you have never seen me.’

‘I understand,’ Leone answered. ‘Where have you been?’

Castiglione smiled at the direct question and the unhesitating tone.

‘I have been in many cities. I am a soldier, and have to go where I am sent.’

At this intelligence Leone felt sure that he had found a new friend. He looked upon all soldiers as his friends, from the poor little infantryman in his long grey woollen coat to the King when he appeared in uniform. He at once laid his hand on Castiglione’s arm and looked up into his face.

‘Are you a bersagliere?’ the boy asked.

Maria still leant against the table, and as she watched the two, the man and the boy, and saw their bright blue eyes and their short and thick brown hair, the room began to move, as if it were going slowly round her. She had never fainted in her life, but she realised that unless she made a great effort she must certainly faint now. She did not hear Castiglione’s answer to the boy’s last question, but she raised her hand to her mouth, and set her small teeth upon her forefinger and bit it till a tiny drop of blood came, and the pain brought her back.

When she could speak steadily she sat down near the closed fireplace, before which there was a glass screen; she pointed to an arm-chair opposite, and Castiglione took it.

Leone had been taught that when visitors came in the afternoon he was to go away after a few minutes without being told to do so. Accordingly, as soon as he saw that his mother and Baldassare were going to talk, he went up to the latter and held out his hand.

‘Good-bye,’ he said gravely. ‘The next time you come, please wear your uniform.’

‘If I come again, I’ll wear it,’ answered Castiglione, smiling.

But Maria saw how earnestly his eyes studied the boy’s face, and how he held the small hand as if he did not wish to let it go. He watched the sturdy little fellow till the door was shut, and Maria saw that he checked a sigh. For the first time in years the two were alone together within four walls, and at first there was silence between them.

Maria spoke first, very coldly and resentfully, for since Leone had left the room she had no reason for hiding what she felt.

‘Why have you come?’ she asked. ‘I told you clearly that I did not wish to see you. You said, too, that you would come at three, and when you appeared I was just going to tell Agostino that I would see no one. You came earlier than you said you would, and it was a trick to catch me. Such things are unworthy.’

Castiglione had clasped his hands on one knee, and he bent his head while she was speaking. When she had finished he looked up with an expression she had never seen in his face, and he spoke in a gentle and almost pleading tone.

‘Let me tell you what I have come to Rome to say.’

‘I would rather not hear it,’ Maria answered coldly. ‘I would rather that you should say nothing during the few minutes I shall have to let you stay—for I do not wish any one to think that I have turned you out of my house.’

Her face was like a mask, and white, for it cost her much to say the words.

‘I have not come to persecute you, Maria,’ he answered sorrowfully. ‘I have not loved you faithfully all these years to come and pain you now.’

Maria Montalto’s lip curled.

‘Faithfully!’ The contemptuous tone told all her unbelief.

‘Yes, I mean it. I have loved you faithfully since we parted, as I loved you before.’

‘I do not believe you; or I do not understand what you mean by faith.’

‘It is easy to understand. Since you and I parted under the ilex-trees I have not spoken of love to any woman. I have lived a clean life.’

Something clutched at the woman’s heart just then, but the next moment she spoke as coldly as before.

‘It is easy to say such things,’ she answered.

‘What I say is true,’ returned Castiglione quietly. ‘But if I tell you this of myself, it is not because I hope to bring your love to life again. I know how dead that is. I know I killed it—yes, I know!’

He spoke with the tone and accent of a man in great pain, and looked down at his clasped hands; but Maria turned her face from him, for she felt the clutching at her heart again. He must not know that he was wrong, and that she loved him still in spite of everything. She would force herself not to believe him.

‘How well you act!’ she said, with cruel scorn.

He did not resent even that. He had violently broken and ruined her whole life long ago; why should she be kind to him?

‘I am not acting, and I am not lying,’ he answered gravely. ‘I have been faithful to you all these years. It is no credit to me, and I ask none, for I love you truly.’

‘How am I to believe you?’ Maria asked, not contemptuously now, but still coldly. ‘Why should I?’

He raised his eyes and met hers steadily, and she saw that there was no mistaking the truth.

‘I give you my word of honour,’ he said slowly, and waited.

She could not speak then, because her joy was so great, in spite of herself; and he would not say more; he only waited while she looked steadily at the mantelpiece, choking down something and hoping that he could not see her face clearly in the rather dim light. He would not stoop to ask if she believed his word, and she was dumb. It was too much, all at once.

Presently, when she thought she could trust her voice, she tried to speak. It had seemed a long time.

‘It is——’ she began.

But she broke off, for she felt the great cry coming in the word that should have followed. Therefore instead of speaking she held out her hand to him and turned her face away from his. They were just so near that by leaning far forward he could hold her fingers. He pressed them quietly for one moment, a little hard, perhaps, but with no attempt to hold them.

‘Thank you,’ he said, not very steadily.

She had regretted the little impulsive action at once, expecting that he would kiss her hand, as almost any man might have done with less reason. But she was glad that he had not; glad, and grateful to him. Perhaps he knew it, but she was able to speak now; he should not think that he had gained a hairbreadth’s advantage.

‘I am glad that you have lived a good life,’ she said, much more kindly than she had spoken yet. ‘But you must not call it faithfulness. You must not mean that you have been faithful to the memory of a great sin, of the worst deed you ever did. It would have been much better to forget me.’

‘You do not understand,’ he answered. ‘My sins are on my soul, and yours with them, if you have any. I am wicked enough to hope that I may never forget you, and that I may live till I die as I have lived since we parted. It is the least I can do, not for your sake, but out of respect for myself and regret for the worst deed I ever did. Yes, you are right, it was that. The question that fills my life is this: Can I in any way atone to you for that deed? Can you ever forgive me so far as not to hate me, and not to despise the mere thought of me, so far as to be willing that I should live in the same city with you and see you sometimes?’

He waited for her answer, but it was long before it came. When she tried to collect her thoughts she was amazed and frightened by the change that had come over her in the last few minutes. Her impulse was to confess frankly that she had always loved him, though she could not forgive him, and to implore him to go away and never to come near her again; and then she remembered that she had said those very words to him long ago under the ilex-trees in the Villa Borghese, with many cruel ones which neither had forgotten. He had given up his leave then, and had gone back to his regiment in a distant city, and he had never come near her nor written to her since.

But there was more than that, much more. He had lived a clean life. She knew the world well enough now, and she knew what the lives of most unmarried men are at Castiglione’s age. Had she not a son to bring up, for whom she prayed daily that he might grow to manhood without reproach as well as without fear? She knew something of how men lived, and she could guess, as far as an honest woman may, at the daily temptations that must assail a good-looking young officer in the smartest cavalry regiment in the country; she guessed, too, that one who chose to live very differently from most of his comrades might not always escape jests which would not turn to actual ridicule only because Castiglione was not a man to be laughed at with impunity; not by any means.

She believed him, and though she might tell him that he was faithful to a sin, to something dangerously near a crime, his faith had been for her, and she could not deny it to herself. It was for her sake that he had not lived like the rest.

Then she covered her eyes with her hand and she saw her own past life clearly, and dared to look at it. The ugly blot was there, plain enough; but if the fault had really been all his, why should the stain look so very black after all those years? He believed that he had sinned against her, not with her; and so she had told herself—and had told him so with bitter reproaches before they had parted. Was it quite, quite true? If it was, she had no cause to reproach herself for the catastrophe. Yet since that hour she had accused herself daily. Of what? Of having loved Baldassare del Castiglione? But she had loved him innocently and dearly when she was seventeen, and ever since. Her mother had known it, but he was poor, he was no match for a girl who was something of an heiress. She had done as many other girls did and always will do; she had yielded to parental pressure, she had promised herself to forget, thinking it would be easy; she had married Montalto, making the great marriage of that season; she had begun to be a wife believing, poor soul, that she had done right in obeying her mother as a daughter should. But she had not forgotten.

Even that was no sin. It was her misfortune, and the natural consequence of a false system that sacrificed too much to money, or to money and name. She had actually been vain of marrying Montalto, for though he bore only the title of count, he was an authentic Count of the Empire, which is quite a different matter from being a Roman ‘conte.’ It had been a very great marriage indeed, and Maria had really been a little foolishly vain of becoming his wife. He had two historic castles in Italy as well as an historical palace in Rome and an historical estate on the Austrian frontier, and he was heir to historical lands in Spain by his mother; and he had a great number of historic ancestors who had been Counts of the Empire and Grandees of Spain, and hereditary Knights of the Sovereign Order of Malta. Everything about Montalto was historical, including his grave face and pointed black beard, and he might have passed for the original of more than one portrait in his historic gallery. His family even had a well-attested White Lady who appeared when one of them was going to die!

But all these things could not make the young wife forget Baldassare del Castiglione, who was only a more or less penniless officer in the Piedmont Lancers. The worst of it was that Montalto liked him, instinctively because his name was also so extremely historical, and fatally because husbands are the last to discover their wives’ preferences. Montalto had thrown Maria and Castiglione together.

She had gone to confession again and again, for she had been brought up to be very devout. Her confessor told her each time that she must avoid the man she loved and pray to forget him. She answered that her husband liked him and constantly asked him to the house; that she could not beg Montalto to change his attitude towards a friend without giving a good reason; and that the only reason she had was that she loved Baldassare with all her heart, though she was told it was wrong now that she was married, and she prayed that she might forget him and love her husband. Her confessor, having ascertained by further questions that she and Castiglione had avowed their love for each other in bygone days, long before her marriage, bade her appeal to the young man’s generosity, and beg him to refuse Montalto’s constant invitations and to see her as little as possible. But the confessor did not know the man. Maria followed the priest’s advice, but Baldassare utterly refused to do what she asked, and became more and more unmanageable from that day. Surely that was not her fault. It was not with this that she reproached herself. She had been afraid to tell Montalto, that was true; there had been one day, at last, when she should have confessed to him, instead of to the priest; she should have thrown herself upon his mercy and implored him to take her away. But then she had lacked courage. She had told herself that her husband loved her devotedly in his silent, respectful way, and that to tell him the truth would be the ruin of his happiness. She felt so sure that his honour was safe! And meanwhile Castiglione grew more passionate every day, more reckless and more uncontrollable; and she loved him the more, and he knew it, though she would not tell him so. She accused herself of that. She should have gone to her husband for protection, for his happiness was far less to him then than his honour. Some women would have invented an untruth as a means justified by the end. Maria might have told Montalto that she was suffering a persecution odious to her; she would have saved her husband’s honour and happiness together, and would even have raised her higher in his esteem. But she could not do it. It would be base, treacherous, and faithless. So she waited and prayed against her heart, and hoped against Castiglione’s nature. Then came the evil hour and it was too late; too late even to lie. She accused herself of having put off too long the one act that could have saved her. But still, and to the end, she had told herself that she had been strong, that she had resisted her own passion as well as the ruthless man who loved her. She had been innocent, she repeated; and she had told her confessor nothing more until she believed that she had changed, and that she hated the man she had loved so well. Then the priest, who was not worldly wise, warned her gently against anything so un-Christian as hatred, and counselled her to forget and to grow indifferent and to devote herself to her husband’s happiness. That sounded very easy to the poor priest.

After that she had altogether given up asking advice of him, and she had let herself be guided by her own sense of honour. Besides, the day soon came when Montalto accused her; and he would not have believed her if she had thrown the whole blame on her lover, for she could not lie and say she had never loved him. So she had not defended herself, and the great wave had gone over her head, and her husband, broken-hearted, had left her for ever; but he had done it in such a way that there had been no open scandal. He had gone to Spain and had come back again, and had gone away again and had stayed longer; he had spoken to his friends of his mother’s wretched health; she could not live in Italy, and Maria could not live in Spain, and he could not be in both places at once. The separation, so far as the world saw it, came by degrees, till it was permanent. Montalto and his wife were not the first couple that had separated quietly, without quarrelling in public, simply because they did not like each other. People did not always know where Maria spent her summers with her child, and the good-natured ones used to say that she saw her husband then; and she lived in such a way in Rome that the blame was all laid on Montalto, and Teresa Crescenzi’s story was believed. Montalto was a brute, who had often struck his wife when he was in one of his fits of anger, and she was little less than a saint.

Castiglione sat waiting for his answer. Would she tell him that he might come back and live near her? Or would she grow hard and cold once more, and bid him go away again, and for ever?

After a long time she raised her head and looked at him quietly.

‘I cannot answer you at once,’ she said; ‘but I promise that I will. You said yesterday that you had a fortnight’s leave. When I have made up my mind what to do I shall let you know, and you must come and see me again.’

Castiglione shook his head gravely and said nothing.

‘What is the matter?’ asked Maria.

‘I suppose you are going to ask advice of your confessor,’ he answered very sadly, and not at all in contempt.

But Maria lifted her head proudly.

‘No,’ she said, ‘I am going to ask myself what is right. And in my thoughts my child shall be the man I hope to make him, and I will ask him what is honourable.’

‘Will you not trust me for that?’ Castiglione asked, and his face lightened.

‘That I even consent to ask myself shows that I trust you more than I did when you surprised me here not half an hour ago. And now please leave me, for I want to be alone. Perhaps I shall send for you to-morrow, or perhaps not for a week. If we chance to meet anywhere, come and speak to me, for people will think it strange if we avoid each other. But I shall ask you to come here for the answer to your question.’

‘Thank you,’ he answered gratefully.

Their hands touched each other for a moment, but neither spoke again, and he went quietly out.