The narrowness of the imagination of the old masters is generally depicted in their canvases. Heaven to them was a serious business of pearly gates, harps, halos, and aËrial flights on ambient pale clouds. Or, was it the imagination of the Church, dominating the imagination of the artist? To paint halos, or to starve? was doubtless the Hamletonian question of the Renaissance. Now Hillard's idea of Heaven—and in all of us it is a singular conception—was Bellaggio in perpetual springtime; Bellaggio, with its cypress, copper-beech, olive, magnolia, bamboo, pines, its gardens, its vineyards, its orchards of mulberry trees, its restful reaches, for there is always a quality of rest in the ability to see far off; Bellaggio, with the emerald Lecco on one side and the blue-green Como on the other, the white villages nestling along the shores, and the great shadowful Italian Alps.

The Villa Serbelloni stands on the wooded promontory, and all day long the warm sunshine floods its walls and terraces and glances from the polished leaves of the tropical plants. The villa remains to-day nearly as it was when Napoleon's forces were in Milan and stabling their horses in the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazia, under the fading Last Supper, by Da Vinci. It is a hotel now, the annex of one of the great hostelries down below in the town. A tortuous path leads up to the villa; and to climb it is to perform the initial step or lesson to proper mountain-climbing. Here and there, in the blue distances, one finds a patch of snow, an exhilarating foretaste of the high Alps north of Domo d' Ossola and south of the icy Rhone.

The six-o'clock boat from Como puffed up noisily and smokily to the quay, churning her side-paddles. The clouds of sunset lay like crimson gashes on the western mountain peaks. Hillard stepped ashore impatiently. What a long day it had been! How white the Villa Serbelloni seemed up there on the little hill-top. He gave his luggage to the porter from the Grand and followed him on foot to the hotel, which was only a dozen steps from the landing. No, he would not dine at the hotel, all but empty at this time of year. He was dining at the Villa Serbelloni above. He dressed quickly, but with the lover's care and the lover's doubt. Less than an hour after leaving the boat he stepped forth from the gardens and took the path up to the villa. The bloom on the wings of the passing swallow, the clouds on the face of the smooth waters, the incense from the flowers now rising upon the vanished sun, the tinted crests encircling, and the soft wind which murmured drowsily among the overhanging branches, all these made the time and place as perfect as a lover's mind could fancy.

Sonia, Sonia; his step took the rhythm of it as he climbed. Sonia, Sonia; the very silence seemed to voice it. And she was waiting for him up there. How would she greet him, knowing that nothing would have brought him to her side but the hope of love? With buoyant step he turned by the porter's lodge and strode down the broad roadway to the villa, a deepening green arch above him.

Handsome he was not; he was more. With his thin, high-bred face, his fine eyes, his slender, graceful figure, he presented that type of gentleman to whom all women pay unconscious homage, whether low-born or high, and in whom the little child places its trust and confidence.

He arrived shortly. As he entered the glass-inclosed corridor the concierge rose from his chair and bowed. Hillard inclined his head and went on. There was no one in the dining-room. In the restaurant there was no one but a lonely Russian countess, who had spent part of the year at the villa for more than a decade. He doffed his hat as he passed through the room and gained the picturesque terrace. Afar he saw a table spread under the great oak. A woman sat by it. She was gazing down the winding terraces toward the Lecco. It was still daylight, and he would have known that head of hair among the ten thousand houris of heaven. Softly, softly! he murmured to his heart, now become insurgent.

Whatever may have been the dream she was following, she dismissed it upon hearing his step, strangely familiar. She did not rise, but she extended her hand, a grave inquiry in her slumbrous eyes. With equal gravity he clasped the hand, but held back the impulse to kiss it. He was not quite sure of himself just then. He sat down opposite her and, smiling, whimsically inquired:

"Now, where did we leave off?"

At first she did not understand.

He enlightened her. "I refer to that Arabian Nights entertainment in New York. Where did we leave off that interesting discussion?"

She smiled brightly. "We shall take up the thread of that discourse with the coffee."

"Why not countermand the order for dinner? I am not hungry."

"But I am," she replied. She was wholly herself now. The tact with which he began his address disembarrassed her. For two days, since she despatched the telegram, she had lived in a kind of ecstatic terror; she had even regretted the message, once it was beyond recall. "I am human enough to be hungry, sometimes." She summoned the waiter.

The dinner was excellent, but Hillard scarcely knew what this or that plate was. All his hunger lay in his eyes. Besides, he did not want to discuss generalities during the intermittent invasions of the waiter, who never knew how many times he stood in danger of being hurled over into the flowering beds of lavender which banked the path of the second terrace. And when he brought the coffee and lingered for further orders, it was Hillard who dismissed him, rather curtly.

"Now! Let me see," he said musingly. "We had agreed that it would be best never to meet again, that to keep the memory of that night fresh in our minds, a souvenir for old age, it were wisest to part then. Well, we can keep the memory of it for our old age; it will be a little secret between us, and we shall talk it over on just such nights as this."

"Isn't this oak the most beautiful you have ever seen?" she remarked, looking up at the great leafy arms above her head.

"The most beautiful in all the world;" but he was not looking at the oak.

"Think of it! It's many centuries old. Empires and kingdoms have risen and vanished. It was here when Michelangelo and Raphael and Titian were ragamuffins in the populous streets; it was leafing when Petrarch indited pages to his Laura; when Dante gazed melancholily upon his Beatrice—Oh, what a little time we have!"

"Then let us make the most of it," he said.

He reached for her hand, which lay upon the cover; but, without apparent notice of his movement, she drew back her hand.

"I have waited patiently for weeks."

She faced him with an enigmatical smile, lighted a match, blew it out, and drew a line across the center of the table.

He laughed. "What, again?"

"Observe."

"Why, there is a break in it!" eagerly and joyously.

She leaned over. "So there is;" but there was no surprise in her voice.

"Is it possible for me to come through?"

"There is one way."

"Put the caskets before me, Portia; I shall not be less wise than Bassanio."

She touched her lips with the knuckle of a finger, in a mood reflective. "A camel and the needle's eye."

"That referred to the rich man. All the world loves a lover, even the solemn old prophets."

"Are you sure?" a return of the old malice.

As a rejoinder he smoothed out the telegram she had sent to him. "Why did you send this to me?"

Her lips had no answer ready; and who can read a woman's heart?

"There can be but one reason," he pursued.

"Friendship."

There was a swish of petticoats, and she was standing at the side of her chair. The beginning of the night was cool, but the fire of the world's desire burned in her cheeks, and she was afraid. She stepped to the railing, faced the purpling mountains, lifted her chin, and sang Die ZauberflÖte. And Hillard dared not touch her till the last note was gone. She felt his nearness, however, as surely as if he had in fact touched her. She tried to sing again, but this time no sound issued from her throat. There was something intangibly hypnotic in his gaze, for presently, without will, she turned and tried to look coldly into his eyes.

"I did not come here because of friendship," he said. "Only one thing brought me—love and the hope of love."

She stared at him, her hand at her throat.

"Love and the hope of love," he repeated. Then he took her in his arms suddenly, hungrily, even roughly. "You are mine, mine; and nothing in the world shall take you from my arms again. Sonia?"

"Don't!" she cried breathlessly. "He is looking."

"It is only a waiter; he doesn't count. Friendship?" He laughed.

"Please!" still struggling.

"Not till you tell me why you sent that telegram."

She pressed her palms against him and stood away. She looked bravely into his eyes now.

"I sent it because I wanted you, because I am tired of lying to my heart, because I have a right to be happy, because—because I love you! Take me, and oh! be good and kind to me, for I have been very lonely and unhappy.... Kiss me!" with a touch of the old imperiousness.

The rim of the early moon shouldered above the frowning death-mask of Napoleon, the huge salmon-tinted mountain on the far side of the Lecco. In the villages the day-sounds had given way to the more peaceful voices of the night. They could hear the occasional light laughter of the gardeners on the second terrace; the bark of a dog in the hills; from the house of the silk-weaver came the tinkle of a guitar. In the houses on the hill opposite and in the villages below the first lights of evening began to glimmer, now here, now there, like fireflies become stationary.

"See Naples and die," she whispered, "but the spirit will come to Bellaggio."

THE END