A soft breath of lamentation; a dim light, which the blue flamelets cast against the massive granite walls in tedious pagan obsequies had never dispelled; a veiled light, which the yellow taper of Christian burial rites could not strengthen; a chill, sepulchral atmosphere; a frequent sob of music; a great, black mass of people, lost, as it were, in the funeral shadows; in the air, in the light, in the flames, in the music, tears shed and the desire to shed more, betokening irremediable woe.

As for him, sitting in his place, and yielding to the state of melancholy contemplation which by infinite, perpetual gradations merged into grief, a secret tremor shook his fibres, and made his pulse throb fast; and by a natural impulse, conscious that he was trembling and pale, he turned round, searching for something in the faint light falling from the velarium.

Beside him he saw that sweetest of women, Donna Angelica, of truly angelic mien. She was habited in black, in deep mourning, as was seemly in the Pantheon, sacred through the glory and the death of the Hero, and her sad eyes were fixed upon a candle that was consuming away. She saw nothing, and appeared to hear nothing, plunged in thoughts assuredly sorrowful, lost in her mournful dreams. Sitting next to a pillar, she had tried to read in her prayer-book the prayers beseeching peace, invoking rest for the departed; but soon the book had fallen into her lap half open, and her listless hands had not taken it up again.

And to him that dearest of mourners, pale as a pearl under her black veil, her sweet lips still apart for the passage of her prayer, her gaze dissolved in sad religious meditation—to him she appeared as a divine shape. And everything, the fitful, blue glare of the lamps, the thin, streaming flames of the candles, the atmosphere of woe, the sorrowful music, the dire gloom that had overcast even the ancient, stolid walls of the Pantheon, the incurable malady of the spirit—to him it was all embodied in that female form sitting near him: she personified the whole of that tepid, damp winter's day, on which the sun was dead; she was the moral seat of the tears that welled from all things; she was the magnetic abyss of sorrow, which the sorrow of all things could never fill, and in the profound shock of his system, in the thrill of his entire being, of flesh, blood, nerves, muscle, in all the strong composition of a strong man, there was aroused, there started into life, grew, abounded, a sentiment of amorous compassion.

She, all unwitting, gave herself up to her woman's fancies, which wandered among the tapers, the dark sacerdotal vestments glittering with gold, the tall, almost colossal, human cuirassier caryatides, among all the pale, dejected, sad, sorrowful, or indifferent faces. In spite of the immense throng of people surrounding the catafalque, in spite of the vague murmur detaching itself from them, in that hour of spiritual freedom she lost herself completely—in that brief restful hour, that hour of freedom in which private grief was renascent, and melted and flowed into the universal grief. Now and then, at a more lugubrious strain of music, at the voice of a singer bathed, as it were, in tears, at a sentence monotonously chanted in minor by the officiating priest, she would start, and her desolate dream would begin again, moving through other phases and other degrees, in other circles of melancholy; and in a new, intenser mood did she set out upon the path of pain that gentle souls all must travel. She did not weep, for the occasion was too big, too solemn; but he perceived how her delicate eyelids, as finely made as the petals of a flower, were shaded about with violet; there had tears been, there more would flow.

And while he thus ardently gazed upon that sweetest of faces, to which the shadows of pain imparted a nobly ideal expression, and was thinking of naught but that white face, half impregnate, half saturate with tears, and had forgotten all else in his amorous contemplation of the lady, he felt a wonderful change within himself. The infinite grief by which she seemed oppressed he naturally and gradually absorbed into his own spirit; it was like penetration into her heart, slow, but infallibly sure. He asked not the meaning of it, but felt his whole self disappear, drown, perish in that woman; he was mastered, not by her, perhaps, but by what she felt. The whole vagueness, mysteriousness, and unfathomableness of a feminine grief, without lament and without tears, without foundation and without limit, which had appealed to his heart now seized upon his brain, invaded it and took possession, driving out all other ideas whatever. No, it was no longer compassion, the great, natural compassion of a man towards a suffering woman; compassion is, after all, a personal feeling; compassion is something egoistic; compassion is a cry from one's self. It was he, he who was suffering now, as if the torture of that female heart were his own torture and anguish; it was he who felt the sharp pricking of the unshed tears scorching his lids; it was he who was in the throes of altruistic sympathy, and seemed to be lost in anguish, in a great waste of anguish, as that woman seemed to be struggling in a void of suffering.

And as the obsequial hour advanced, in the pagan temple where the Hero lay in state, a subtle odour of Christian incense went up; from altar to roof the smoke curled upward in graceful spiral shapes, which became more and more attenuated and ethereal until they vanished above, even like prayers ascending to the Most High. The incense, too, partook of the aromatic savour of tears, and the perfume of it, going through the nostrils to the brain, profoundly affected the nerves, caressing them into a state of voluptuous woe. In the half-light everything seemed to sway under that tragic, aromatic kiss; the women had all bent their brows to conceal the trembling of their lips, and the head of the woman he was watching was bowed down, as though her strength was gone. He sustained a shock, and made a motion as if to support her; but a sort of paralysis fell upon his limbs. The incense burned and burned in the silver censers, without flame, overcoming his last efforts of resistance.

A bell rang faintly, but in the midst of such silence it sounded sonorous; Donna Angelica slid from her seat down upon the cold marble floor, covered her face with her hands, and was no more than a heap of black clothes on the ground, unseen, unseeing, forlorn. And he, without kneeling, without inclining his head, without praying, felt annihilated in the woman's annihilation; everything seemed at an end for him, as everything was for her. And at each sound of the bell, as she gave a start as though called by a distant voice, the same action was reflected in him; nothing that spiritually took rise in her but was expressed in him by reflection.

A line of priests, with lighted tapers, drew up round the catafalque; a silver cross, on which hung the dying Saviour, stood fronting the bier. And through the music a strident, rending voice was heard—a voice that did not sing, but cried; a voice that did not ask, but implored: 'Libera, libera, libera me, Domine.' The Christian prayer, the painful cry begging salvation, made the sweet lady raise her eyes. And in her features, consuming away in their pallor like a fading flower, in her transfigured features, a true, intense aspiration was declared.

Now, while the piercing, distressful voice of the singer sued to heaven for deliverance with religious fervour, Donna Angelica, after passing through all the stages of undefined grief, felt a distinct need form in her heart. She now spoke to God, her lips moving as she prayed for deliverance. What had been indefinite till then now was defined: it was deliverance—deliverance from all that had been, good or evil, happiness or wretchedness—'From all, even this, O Lord! From all, even what has been, merciful Lord! From all, even the dreadful past, O God of pity!'

As for him who lay in the sepulchre, and whose funeral obsequies were being celebrated, deliverance had come to him at the glorious height to which he had risen; he had found deliverance, and perhaps special grace. The weight of a royal crown, the burden of a reign, the heavy responsibility of the law and of the majestic will, a load of thought and care—deliverance had come to lift all from his soul, now at rest in the ineffable peace. 'As the King sleeps, so let me sleep, O Lord!' she prayed. 'As Thou hast delivered the strong soul of the King, O Lord, so do Thou deliver my weak soul! Even if Death be the deliverer, let me die and be delivered, O Lord!'

In this supreme moment the lovely, despairing creature stretched out her arms to heaven, and as she prayed the hot, rebellious tears, so long restrained, coursed down her cheeks.

He had heard, in a mysterious way, what she besought of God. And that mourning petition, that last appeal of sorrow, gathered into a word, that agonized, Christian supplication, had also flowed from his own heart, amid the music, in the sensuous sadness of the incense, in the sepulchral glimmer of the candles, in the uncertain rocking of the light, under that blue-tinted circle of the velarium, which seemed to be alive. There sprang up in his virile heart, and flowed from it, the prayer of desolation she offered up; what she desired, he desired. An exalted satisfaction of the soul resulted from this feeling of a common desire; so sharp was the strain, so intensely was his will concentrated upon a single object, that his being seemed multiplied. And as he turned, and saw her feebly weeping, he yielded to the successive, softening emotions of great satisfaction and great sorrow, and bowed his proud head. In truth, he also was weeping—for very love.

* * * * *

Her face almost buried in a bunch of white roses, with which she was toying, and whose fresh, strong perfume coloured her cheeks, Donna Angelica Vargas was listening to a conversation between her husband and Francesco Sangiorgio.

They had been talking politics for an hour, or, rather, Don Silvio Vargas had been talking, as he reclined in his easy-chair, smoking a pestilent Tuscan cigar, and gazing at the dainty flowers painted on the light gray ceiling of the room. He spoke in a dry, hissing voice, by fits and starts, and in abrupt phrases, between the puffs of smoke; every now and then he tugged at his spare moustache, which, despite his years, had remained as brown as his hair. Age did not show in that lean old man, excepting in the thin lines at the corners of the eyes, running fan-shaped to the temples; in the two deep furrows at the corners of the mouth, dug out by his smile; in the hardness of all his features, become almost rigid; in the fleshless neck, where the tendons stood out like the strings of a violin. But otherwise he was strong and robust in his leanness, and when he inserted the round, unframed eyeglass, suspended on a black cord, under his eyebrow, his features assumed a certain vivacity, became almost youthful.

With Don Silvio Vargas this eyeglass was an infallible barometer: in his hours of rest the eyebrow scarcely retained it; in the hours of indifference it seemed dull and tarnished, the eye behind it being fixed, and closed or half closed; in the hours of utter weariness, of disgust, the lens loosened from its ring, fell upon his chest, wandered into the folds of his coat and waistcoat; in the hours of conflict, in skirmish, and in battle, the glass stood rigid in its place, clear and bright, and his eye was wide open and scintillant. Both enemies and friends, too much in earnest to be observers, never took note of these changes until later, until afterwards; they overlooked the political barometer; they felt the man's strength, or his weakness, but they did not see the symbols of either.

When, after luncheon, Angelica heard Sangiorgio announced, she had risen to leave the room, but her husband, as he folded up a newspaper and opened another, curtly requested her to stay, as if he intended to be obeyed. She remained standing by a vase of cineraria, flourishing in spite of the severe winter weather. She bowed to the new arrival, and did not join in the conversation. Her slender, youthful figure—she had recently quitted her mourning—was clad in a soft gown of claustral colour, material, and style; a thick silk girdle encircled her waist, and her beautiful white hands were lost in the amplitude of the sleeves. From time to time she looked up; at a clever or spirited remark from her husband she would smile, to show that she was interested in the conversation—that she understood, that she approved. At a reply from Sangiorgio, at one of his objections or statements, she would cast a brief glance of appreciative intelligence at him. And meanwhile she tended her plants, lovingly, eyeing them with great solicitude, removing the dust with which their leaves were covered, breaking off the little dried branches and the decayed blossoms, which spoiled their beauty and freshness. She went to and fro among the quantity of green plants, which lent the little drawing-room the appearance of a vernal bower, her tiny white hands coming out of the wide, nunlike sleeves, her fingers pretty as a child's. As she bent over the plants, the white nape of her neck was visible, where her dark hair traced a thick wavy line. When she turned towards Don Silvio or Sangiorgio, it was seen that the violet shadows were absent from her sweet face, from the lids which had shed or suppressed so many tears; charming peace reigned there instead. At a certain moment she cast an inquiring glance at her husband's gloomy face; the bright eye behind the single glass told her to remain. Yet she had finished the daily visit to her plants. She took a bunch of roses from a vase, seated herself in an arm-chair near a bay-window, and inhaled the scent of the flowers, while a little colour strayed to her pale cheeks. On chairs, tables, and mantel lay piled a number of discarded and opened and uncut newspapers, smelling strongly of printer's ink; ragged packages of various colours were strewn on the floor, thrown down there hastily and carelessly. But Donna Angelica neither took up, nor touched, nor even looked at, any of the newspapers; her foot, as if instinct with neatness, pushed two or three of the packages aside. She was smelling the flowers.

Sangiorgio had come to that house in the Piazza dell' Apollinare upon the invitation of Silvio Vargas. The Minister of Home Affairs had stopped him on the threshold of the Pantheon, had passed his arm into his, and had spoken to him in an undertone for several minutes. Then he had insisted upon his coming to his house, not to his office—yes, to his house, where they could talk after luncheon—and why the deuce was he never seen there!

'To-morrow, then?' asked Sangiorgio hesitatingly. 'What is the use of to-morrow? No! to-day—this very day!' said Vargas. He repeated that he must talk with him, and, leaving Sangiorgio's arm for his wife's, went off with her.

Sangiorgio went to the Piazza Apollinare at one o'clock. Fearing he might be too early, he was seized with a fit of hesitation at the door. But once inside, he was quickly reassured by Don Silvio's cordial manner. Only, while the Minister talked, he listened to be sure, but followed Donna Angelica in each of her quiet, graceful movements.

'Smoke! Why don't you smoke?' Don Silvio urged him, offering him some cigars while he chewed the end of his Tuscan.

Sangiorgio looked inquiringly in the lady's direction.

'My wife is accustomed to it; she does not object,' briefly commented the Minister.

Sangiorgio did not smoke, however, Donna Angelica's engaging smile notwithstanding. Seated near a little round table, he listened rather than spoke, for Don Silvio liked to be listened to. The Minister, who adored politics with the fervour of a boy of twenty, was that day greatly wrought up on the subject. In the very abuse he levelled at politics, in the very deprecations he showered on them, in his now sarcastically, now angrily nervous speech, the flaming passion for politics was evident that burned in the breast of the old Parliamentarian. And from Don Silvio, Sangiorgio seemed to hear, as if in a dream, a portion of his own thought, an echo of his own aspiring ambition, whose fancies he had never confided to a living soul. He recognised the same fever which had internally consumed him for years, while in Don Silvio the spiritual fire found expression in ideas and words. The Minister was too old, and too passionate by nature, to hide his feelings; he no longer cared to dissemble them. That inner flame must have kept Don Silvio's enthusiasm aglow. Thus did Sangiorgio reason out the cause of such prolonged and lasting vigour.

Occasionally, Don Silvio, as he looked at Sangiorgio, suppressed the sneer which deepened the furrows at the corners of his mouth, and smiled almost tenderly. Oh, he did not forget, not he, how his predecessor had fallen after a speech and a motion by Sangiorgio; he remembered Sangiorgio's brief refusal to enter the reorganized Cabinet. He had never been able to testify his gratitude, but ever since the opening of the new session had shown him his affection, had sought his company, consulted him, in a spirit of mingled deference and cordiality.

'But, at bottom, you are indifferent to power,' said Sangiorgio, after a pause in the conversation.

'No,' answered Vargas frankly, 'I am not indifferent to it; I like it; I wanted it. But the Opposition disgusts me. Sometimes it is stupid, sometimes false, sometimes brutal, and it always acts in bad faith. Where is our loyal, bold, cruel, implacable Opposition? Instead of open attack, they indulge in low pantry gossip; instead of fighting, they sneak in corners; instead of an open onslaught, it is trickery!'

'Man is a paltry creature,' observed Sangiorgio.

'He ought not to be, or ought not to appear so, if he is. By the Lord! have I not been in Opposition, too? You remember, Angelica, when I was in Opposition?'

'I remember,' she answered in the sweetest voice, raising her head.

'I was a devil. I took no rest, and gave my enemies none. Never a moment's truce! Now I am petrifying. I cannot make war now, I must wait for it; and this eternal brigandage makes my blood boil! How you fell upon the Minister that day, Sangiorgio! And you were Ministerial! Were you there that day, Angelica?'

'Yes, I was there.'

'And it is to you we owe it that I am Minister of Home Affairs,' said Vargas with emotion.

'Oh no!' murmured Sangiorgio, smiling.

'Yes, yes! The Prime Minister would never have had the courage to disavow his colleague openly. It surprises me, nevertheless, that he spoke of it to you; no one was aware of it—not even myself.'

'The Premier had told me nothing,' replied Sangiorgio deliberately.

'What! you knew nothing about it?'

'Nothing.'

'There was no understanding?'

'No.'

'By God!' exclaimed Vargas, 'you are wonderful!' And he admiringly looked Sangiorgio all over. The latter laughed formally, but immediately perceived that Angelica's face was losing its serenity, and was invaded by an air of fatigue.

'Come to the Chamber with me, Sangiorgio; it is two o'clock,' said Vargas, rising to take his departure.

'Shall you be back soon?' asked his wife, fighting down her appearance of lassitude.

'No; there is the Chamber first, and then the Senate, and afterwards I must go to my office, to arrange about a transfer of some Prefects.'

'Shall you be here at seven?'

'About eight or nine—I don't know.'

'Shall I call for you at the Chamber?'

'No, go for a walk to the Villa Borghese, or outside the Porta Pia—anywhere you like. It is no use coming to the Parliament! I shall dine after I have finished. This affair about the Prefects is very serious. I will tell you about it on the way, Sangiorgio. If any letters, or messages, or despatches arrive, let them be sent at once to wherever I am, in the Chamber, or the Senate, or my office. I am expecting important news. I am coming, Sangiorgio.'

And orders were dealt out, short and concise, to his wife and to the secretary who had entered the room; they were delivered in a tone of military command. Don Silvio stood there firm, erect, and strong, like a young man. His feverish ardour was his support; his enthusiasm was his salvation. He went into his study, taking his secretary with him, speaking in low tones and very sharply. Francesco and Angelica remained alone, he standing upright, she with head bent as if in prayer, her fingers playing with the silk girdle about her waist. They did not speak, and the moments went by in the prolonged vibration of a musical beat. Suddenly she looked at him with saddened eyes, clasped her hands, and said:

'Why did you want us to have this Home Minister's place?' And her voice trembled with restrained feeling.

Don Silvio returned with overcoat and hat, rolling the extinguished stump of his Tuscan cigar between his lips, his secretary following, with a portfolio full of papers.

'Would you like a rose?' said Angelica to her husband, on the spur of the moment, offering to put one in his buttonhole.

'What can you be thinking of!' he cried, repelling the white hand with a certain degree of roughness. 'Do you want the Opposition to quizz me? A Minister with a rose! I should become the subject of caricatures in the newspapers at once!'

Donna Angelica timidly drew back, casting a furtive glance at Sangiorgio. But she did not give him the rose.

* * * * *

A low sky, with gray, leaden, heavy clouds, becoming black on the horizon, over the Tusculan hills, on Soratte, which itself might have been a great cloud settled down upon the earth; the Campagna bare and wan, undulating in places as though heaving up its inwards; two black hedges, two prickly scant hedges, without a sign of green, without a blossom; a tavern, with a rude depiction on the damp wall of three black decanters standing on a triangle and a girl drinking wine, but with doors and windows barred by decayed wooden shutters; the large gray building where the widow Mangani gives Roman summer and autumn holiday-makers tripe in sauce to eat on a terrace, in an arbour, or in a small yard, where there is room for a table and a pint of white wine; the curious ruin, alone in a field, which bears the semblance of a gigantic armchair with a chipped back, and which in fact is known as the Devil's Chair; a carter lying dozing, face down, on a load of volcano ashes he was bringing into Rome; an occasional fat drop of rain that fell upon the ground; this side St. Agnes' a Cardinal's carriage returning leisurely from the Catacombs, and a few priests walking on both sides of the road; immediately beyond St. Agnes' two carabineers sitting rigid on horseback, wrapped up in their dark cloaks; a gentle, mild breeze that swept the earth; a pungent smell, the peculiar smell of the Roman Campagna, which goes to the brain, and from the brain goes into the system like an insidious miasma; a strange dog, all muddy, that went sniffing along the hedges and looked at every wayfarer with sad, unhappy eyes—these were the things, people, animals, surroundings, seen by Francesco Sangiorgio, towards the close of a winter's day, in the Via Nomentana. And over all things, animals, houses, churches, hung the deep gloom of the imminent rainstorm, the tremendous gloom of a Roman sunset in the Campagna.

'Here is the Ponte Nomentana,' said the coachman, pointing to it with his whip.

'Stop; I wish to get out. And wait for me here,' said Sangiorgio.

He walked up the little slope to the bridge, the strange walled bridge, whose broad, graceful arch curves over the gurgling waters of the Aniene, with two large casements facing up stream and down. Sangiorgio stood on the bridge, and, leaning on a ledge, looked into the distance whence the river came.

It flowed with a narrow, but deep, winding and singularly rapid current, increased by winter rains; it flowed a dull, silvery, but cold white, without a shimmer and utterly glacial. A number of little whirlpools took shape, tiny circles with an interior mouth round which the water coursed in circular ripplets.

On the bank was a little mould of lighter colour, but no vegetation, no gravel, no volcano ashes, and round about was the great desert of the Roman Campagna.

It was not raining as yet, but the vapours from the river and the moist sirocco had imparted a certain dampness to the old bridge, and as he touched the wall at a casement where he was standing, Sangiorgio felt the trickling wet; the elbows of his coat were soaking and dirtied. He scanned the Campagna intently, but neither the poorest specimen of a tree nor the meanest specimen of a human being was in sight; the river, which at Tivoli is so magnificent, so gay, so clamorous, over there ran to a very mournful strain.

He then posted himself at the casement on the left, and watched the water flow swiftly down to join the Tiber. From here the Via Nomentana was seen to continue over the plain, to make an angle and vanish. In the middle of a field stood a cottage, a tumbledown hovel, with two rooms and no ceiling, and walls like broken teeth; at the corner of the road was a tidy, white little cottage, the Huntsman's Inn, from which a fine meadow stretched down to the river. In the water stood willow bushes, with blackish, scrawny branches; on the banks were small willows, equally scrawny. A boat was held in the stream by means of a rope attached to a wooden post driven into the shore; the water broke gurgling against boat, willows, and rope.

With the descending darkness, the sky, too, seemed to descend. Gazing with the strenuousness of an earnest searcher, Sangiorgio perceived a closed carriage to stop near the Huntsman's Inn, but it had halted in such a way that he could see neither horse nor coachman. And then, from afar, on the river's right bank, he saw a dark spot that grew and grew, and he recognised the sweet lady who had wept in church.

Dressed in black, she wended her solitary way along the river, walking up-stream, pausing every now and then to look at the speeding current; she moved gently, very close to the water, sinking into the spongy soil, advancing with measured footsteps.

When she had drawn nearer, he observed against the dark dress the bunch of white roses from the room at home full of green plants; she held them clasped to her waist with her hands. Two or three times she turned to the horizon, in admiration of the sad sky, which seemed about to smother the earth, and looked for the Tusculan hills already hidden by the approaching storm. Then she resumed her lonely walk with such lightness of action that she seemed barely to graze the earth.

Not once did she raise her eyes to the walls of the bridge, to the wide casement where stood he who was watching her. Assuredly she believed herself in absolute solitude, in that vast bare Campagna, that threatening tempest, that last hour of daylight, that melancholy landscape, from which the vulgar would shrink; she believed herself alone, as if in church, praying to God, speaking to God.

At fifty paces from the bridge, near the rotten post to which the boat's rope was tied, Donna Angelica stopped short. She looked as if she had been suddenly overtaken by fatigue, despite the slowness of her gait, or perhaps she had succumbed to the great fascination of running water that seizes upon the spirit of the beholder and keeps it under a spell. Indeed, leaning against the post, as if rooted to the river-bank, at one step from the coursing stream, which bent the dark boughs of the willows, Donna Angelica was entirely lost in contemplation of the river.

An immense dark roof of clouds—a shroud forestalling night—now shut in the whole horizon round about, and the light seemed slowly perishing, as if being crushed between sky and earth. Sangiorgio was unconscious of everything save that female form, standing stark as a statue on the bank of the river. But a rumbling noise came from the Via Nomentana, a sound of wheels, of trotting horses; and in the gray light something red and bright flashed by. Under the lowered hood of a Daumont carriage something white passed by—a fugitive face, a royal face. The royal carriage crossed the bridge at a trot, the royal lady having responded to Sangiorgio's bow; and the whole brief, vivid, transient vision disappeared in the direction of Rome. Sangiorgio again turned to the river.

The lady was unaware of all this. Lost in thought, the noise and the purple passage of the royal equipage—a sort of brilliant, gleaming comet, which for an instant had lit up the darkness of the cloud-ensombred twilight—had escaped her. She seemed to be unable to tear herself away from the sight of the austere Aniene, with its gelid waters. He saw her bend over several times, as if she were trying to mirror herself in the river, or to discern the bottom of it. Her fingers hereupon plucked a rose to pieces, and threw the white leaves into the hurrying flood, which carried them away; one after another she picked off all the leaves, throwing them adrift upon the current by handfuls. She did not angrily ravish the white leaves from their stem, but detached them lingeringly, as if everything in her soul were actually departing or dying with the departing, dying leaves. The hands relinquishing those floral lives had also known the desolation and death of other lives. The last leaf, indeed, faded between her fingers. He could not see all this from the distance, but he guessed it; and as the last leaf went, withered and crumpled, he felt a languor as of death overtake him. After a last look at the Aniene, the lady went back to the road without a backward glance, and got into her carriage. It passed over the bridge at high speed. Donna Angelica did not see Sangiorgio, but he saw very plainly how the pale creature was still pressing the stripped stems of the dead roses to her side.

---

From his Centrist bench, where he was pretending to write letters, but where he was in reality mechanically tracing her name twenty, thirty times on a sheet of paper, he distinctly saw Donna Angelica Vargas alone in the diplomatic gallery, leaning on its velvet edge. He had felt her presence suddenly, with a nervous shock; he had ventured to turn two or three times to bow to her. She had responded with a grave smile, but had immediately looked away. He knew no desire but to go up there and sit beside her, only he thought perhaps it would be improper to be seen by so many of his colleagues, to make an exhibition of himself. Later the desire became so strong that he rose from his seat, crossed the hall, and went out into the corridor, where he wandered about abstractedly, giving monosyllabic replies to all who spoke to him about the University Reform Law. Upon returning, he still lacked the courage to go up, and was ashamed of his own cowardice. When he was near the Ministerial Bench, Don Silvio Vargas called to him:

'Sangiorgio, listen——'

And he told him something about the Communal and Provincial Law, which was then being discussed for the third time.

Don Silvio's friendship for Sangiorgio had grown rapidly in a short period. Whenever he was in doubt as to some political or administrative question, he took him to his house, consulted him, or had long conversations with him at his office. This time he had another idea to submit to him. Sangiorgio gave him his opinion, and then added:

'Is Madame Vargas up there?'

'Oh yes,' said Vargas quite indifferently, without turning his head. 'Do you think these clauses will be debated on?'

'Yes, especially the fourth; the Extreme Left attaches great importance to it.'

'Shall you speak, Sangiorgio?'

'I hardly know——'

'You ought to speak. Listen: come to dinner at my house to-morrow; I want to explain some of my views to you.'

'I shall be there,' replied the other after a moment's hesitation.

Hereupon he moved off, but the Minister whispered to him to come back.

'As you are going to sacrifice yourself to me, go up and keep my wife company for a little. She is bored to death, and I have not even time to nod to her.'

'She is bored, you say?'

'She loathes politics. Woman is selfish, my dear Sangiorgio,' answered Don Silvio philosophically, squeezing his glass in under his eyebrow.

Sangiorgio gathered up his papers with ill-dissembled haste, thrust them into his locker, traversed the hall and corridors, and went up the stairs, curbing himself lest he should run. But Donna Angelica did not turn round upon hearing the door of the gallery open.

'Are you very tired?' he gently asked over her shoulder.

'Not more so than usual,' she responded, turning slightly and putting out her hand to him, without manifesting the least surprise.

He sat down behind her. She spoke to him without looking at him, which she would also have done had he been beside her, for she was looking down into the hall.

'But you seem to come here often,' he urged.

'Yes, often. Even our dislikes become habits; and besides—Silvio is a Minister, and many people think I am an influential woman. At home there is a constant stream of them who want something.'

'One can close one's door.'

'Yes, if one happens to be an ordinary woman, but not if one is the wife of a politician, of a Minister. Don Silvio is always afraid I shall make him lose his popularity.' Her voice was choked with bitterness.

'No doubt you often must endure vulgar acquaintances?' he asked in a sympathetic tone that made her change colour.

'Yes, I am indulgent enough. It is natural to me to be indulgent. But vulgarity is offensive and painful to me.'

'You must keep your heart up.'

'My heart? The heart does not enter into the question at all! It is the moral being that suffers, and the nerves. So I prefer to come here; it is the lesser of two evils.'

'Do you hate politics so much?' he ventured.

'I do not hate them, and I cannot like them.'

'Nevertheless, it is a great and noble idea,' he hazarded again.

'So they say—but I do not believe it. I understand other ideas as being noble, good, great, generous, fruitful—not this one. I am too ignorant,' she added humbly.

'No, no,' he hastened to assure her. 'You are perhaps right!'

'I am unable to like this idea. To us women certain ideas, abstract ideas especially, convey nothing. We require something real, represented by something concrete—religion by the Church, the figure of the Holy Virgin, Christ; our country by lovely scenery, the sea, the mountains, the friends we love. But politics—a mere idea—what is there to stand for politics?'

'The politicians,' he murmured, after holding back a little.

'Oh yes!' she exclaimed with cold disdain.

'Do you hate them, too?'

'I pity them.'

He felt no impulse to retort, but an expression of pain came over his face.

'Well, look at them all; look at them, Honourable! Look at the haggard, worn faces, yellow with bile, green with envy! Look at the fat, flaccid faces, pale and unhealthy! How worn out before their time are some of those men, and what nervousness in the gestures of others! They all seem afflicted with the same disease—a fatal malady which eats them up or swells them out. I imagine that gamblers in the gambling dens must be like them.'

'At least, politics are a great passion,' he timidly suggested.

'Great? Perhaps. So people say, but I do not believe it. When politics possess the soul, they fetter it with contemptible pride, paltry ambitions. Down there are three hundred people, who have minds, and who are educated, who have physical and moral courage, who have honest consciences and manly characters. Very well; those three hundred clever, brave men, those three hundred wills, those consciences, those intelligences—what do they all want, without exception, at any cost?'

'To be Minister.'

'Minister—at any cost whatever. And in that unrelenting pursuit, pray ask yourself, does not the mind ever go miserably to waste? Does not that mind, capable of creating wonders of beauty and utility, if it were applied to the arts and sciences, often accomplish nothing?'

'It is true,' he admitted.

'To invent a machine which will benefit mankind, morally or physically, is that not better than overthrowing a Ministry? Is it not better to carve a statue, paint a picture, or write a book?'

'It is true,' he averred.

'As for bravery, do you think its true impetuosity can be preserved, and its true dashing valour, here, where everything is summed up in a speech, where all worthy initiative is frittered away in twenty-five public sittings and fourteen discussions in committee? All words, all words!'

'But we fought when we were wanted.'

'Ah!' she said, suddenly become thoughtful, 'those were times! We women, you see, understand the heroism of the battlefield and of conspiracies, but Parliamentary heroism escapes us!'

For a moment they maintained silence. Donna Angelica's cheeks were aflame, and her hot words, surging into Sangiorgio's soul, made their imprint there as if on soft wax.

'And then there is conscience,' she resumed, purposing to speak out her mind fully. 'Heavens! how can it remain clean among so many personal schemes, so many unavoidable bargains, so much equivocation? How can it be changeless and inflexible when the surest virtue leading to success is actually elasticity?'

'True, true,' he repeated.

'Some are mad over politics, I know very well,' she continued, looking down into the hall, her fingers playing on the velvet edge of the gallery. 'We all know that, we politicians wives. In the hearts of these men it is a passion which dries up all the others. If we live in the provinces, our husband leaves us for nine months in the year, without a thought of his wife's youth, beauty, or solitude. If we come to Rome, it is worse. The house becomes a small Parliament, where conspiracies are hatched if we are not in power, where methods of defence are planned if we belong to the Cabinet. No more friends. Confederates, clients, parasites, rivals, self-seekers—none but such. Their affection is not asked for, but their vote is. Who says "Yes" is a friend; who says "No" is a traitor. The privacy of the home disappears. It is invaded by a stream of strange people who sully it, who turn it into a vestibule, a courtyard, a street, a public square. Confidence vanishes. Our husband is worried and disturbed; we seek to know the reason, and he believes we cannot understand, for politicians despise the advice of women. At table the husband reads newspapers or answers telegrams. At balls he finds it difficult to escort us, yet he is obliged to go, so as to represent the Government, in order to meet influential deputies, to make his bow to the wives of the party leaders, to shake hands with the insignificant creatures who would not live if the great political passion did not. It is either a case of melancholy solitude in the country, like a poor abandoned thing, or else of being mobbed in town, without a breath of poetry, without a smile of the ideal. A great passion, to be sure, but so mad and absorbing and confining that it creates fears and disgust!'

Another long silence. Don Silvio Vargas was speaking in the hall, with his strident voice, his hands in his pockets, his thin, spare body swaying slightly, looking at an interlocutor through his shining eyeglass, as if he were making game of him, with the mocking irony that irritated his opponents.

'A great passion, a great passion,' murmured Donna Angelica. 'Women understand only one.'

'Which is?'

'Love.'

'That is true,' answered Sangiorgio.

* * * * *

'We dine alone to-day,' said Don Silvio, sitting down at table. 'Donna Angelica is in her room, dressing for the ball at the Quirinal.'

The secretary sat down with them at the small family dinner-table; the fourth seat—that of the lady of the house—remained empty. In the middle of the table stood a slender-necked vase, containing red lilies, and Sangiorgio's eyes continually wandered from the vacant chair to the great red flowers. The two deputies—the Minister and the important politician—eagerly discussed politics, eating all the while, Don Silvio slashing his meat nervously while he waxed warm over the Communal and Provincial Law, Sangiorgio listening, answering, stating objections, forgetting to dine. But his thoughts were in a little room panelled with light wood, and cosily heated by a crackling grate fire—for thus he conceived of Donna Angelica's retreat.

The secretary only bestowed any real thought on dining, and devoted his whole gastronomical energies to it. But he maintained a serious face; every now and then he seconded a remark from the Minister with a nod, with an air of restrained admiration; at Sangiorgio's sayings he would often knit his brows, as if a difficulty mentioned were apparent to him also.

Thus the dinner went by, while two footmen brought in now a telegram, now letters, now a newspaper, or a new dish. Don Silvio at once tore open the despatches, opened and read the letters, cut the cover of the newspapers, and ran his eye down the columns; he would not taste the food, but looked at it with the abstracted gaze of a wandering mind.

Beside him were an inkstand, a pen, telegraph-blanks, notepaper, and he would write answers then and there, after pushing his plate away from him. The newspapers he handed to his secretary, having first marked certain places with a red pencil; the secretary read the marked passages with the placidity of an old diplomat. In the meantime Sangiorgio was vainly listening for some feminine sound, vainly keeping on the alert for the least incident: not a maid came through, not a bell rang; nothing feminine happened; not a flower was wanted, not a candlestick was brought; there was no bustle of servants; nothing occurred—nothing whatever.

In the privacy of her apartment Donna Angelica was in the throes of the romantic and feverish excitement of a woman dressing for a ball; and the great mystery of beauty adorning itself—amid lustre-imparting, perfumed liquids, loose hair, scattered flowers, billowy gauze, sparkling jewels, smooth silks, soft furs—modern woman's great mystery of Isis, was being accomplished as in a tabernacle.

An evermore consuming desire to know or hear something assailed Sangiorgio in the dining-room during all the political discussion and writing; a desire caused by the vacant place at the table where the chair stood; a desire springing from the red lilies—the fiery St. Louis lilies—which seemed to combine purity and the heat of passion. If only she would come out for a moment, to greet her husband, to greet her guest! If she would but show herself, radiant in her youth and beauty! Each time a door opened, as the evening wore on, Sangiorgio started, shutting his eyes, seeming to see her appear in the splendour of her loveliness and her dress. But other telegrams, messages, and letters arrived; in one instance Don Silvio drew a cipher-book from his pocket to translate a political despatch. Where could Donna Angelica be? In what floods of perfume had she vanished?

The time went by, and there was no sign of anything in the house reminiscent of ballroom gaiety; the house kept its busy atmosphere; the slamming of doors continued, the loud or low discussions, the coming and going of written and printed papers. It was like a public square, a stock exchange, a political institution, a camping-ground for all manner of intrigue, deceit, and turmoil. Perhaps in the sanctuary within, which harboured Donna Angelica's youth and beauty, there were signs of the female excitement that precedes a ball, and to which is always due a ravishing confusion of scattered linen, silk stockings hanging out of open drawers, unstoppered vials, corsets straggling over the floor. But of such feminine disarray, of such intoxicating disorder, so fascinating to a husband or a lover, no indication passed outside her apartment. Through the three or four doors separating him from the woman he loved Francesco Sangiorgio felt this new charm, which was quite earthly, and which captivated him in a new way, addressing itself to his instincts of sex. He felt the contrast between the weariness, the emptiness of Don Silvio's tumultuous life, and the poetical delicacy of that feminine toilet, and all the perturbation of heart and senses instilled by everything that comes into contact with a woman's body.

At last, at ten o'clock, doors were opened and shut, and subdued voices heard; and Sangiorgio, choked by his one wish, shut his eyes to avoid the blinding spectacle of Donna Angelica's beauty. But no one appeared; a dull rumble of wheels was audible in the courtyard, and then in the Piazza dell' Apollinare.

'Donna Angelica has gone to the Quirinal,' said Don Silvio calmly, opening the Riforma, which had just been brought in. 'Shall you not be going, too, Sangiorgio?'

'Later on,' feebly answered Sangiorgio, who had turned deadly pale.

* * * * *

In the white electric light illuminating the grand staircase of the Quirinal the women were slowly making their way upward, touching the carpet only with the toes of their satin slippers. And with sweeping trains, with rich, soft, warm, white cloaks over their nude shoulders, with heads begemmed, befeathered, or beflowered, in their ascent they cast stray glances at the two great green shrubs, at the Muses among the broad, red-veined leaves, at the palms that stood darkly against the white stucco of the walls. The women went up slowly, so as not to become ruffled, and in order that the even pallor or the florid pink of their cheeks might not be disturbed. After all their nervous excitement, the calm self-possession of women determined to look handsome asserted itself. It was enough to see how composedly, in the great, chilly, tapestried place transformed into a cloak-room, they untied their bows, and undid their hoods or their cloaks, allowing them to slip gently from their shoulders, maintaining their likeness to beautiful, self-moving statues. It was enough to see the phlegmatic way in which they smoothed out the flexible Swedish gloves over their arms, while husband, brother, or father was impatiently waiting to escort an unconcerned charmer, who was quietly readjusting a shoulder-sleeve that had become displaced.

The journey, too, through the other two rooms and a corridor with statues, was easy and silent; but when the ladies reached the warmer atmosphere spread around by the stoves, and began feeling gratified at their nearness to the scene of pleasure, their lips parted in elaborate ballroom smiles, of the sort which are diffused over the whole face, over the whole person. Near the door of the ballroom, the Chamberlain, offering them a programme, a bunch of flowers, and his arm to take them in, was privileged with the first smile, father, husband, or brother being abandoned without a bow, without a word.

There was a vast glitter of jewellery. Upon three rows of red benches sat 300 women, jewels in their hair, on their ears, their bare necks, bosoms, and arms. From some headdresses more unpretentious than the rest shone forth a thin, piercing ray, but when some of the stately shoulders moved, or an arm, or feathered fan, there was a whole torrent of sparks, a brilliant flash of lightning. The women were crowded together, and one female costume counteracted and neutralized another, to be in its turn counteracted and neutralized; neither materials nor colours might be distinguished; only a glimpse could be obtained of a bodice or a bit of shoulder-sleeve sometimes concealed by a flower, a bow, or an ornament. And what eclipsed everything, soft billows of gauze, sheen of satin, intricacy of lace, heavy, dark hair, light, fair locks, the almost living skin of the gloves, the pink on necks, shoulders, arms, was the jewellery; more luminous, more vivid in colour, more iridescent than all, were the triumphant jewels.

And under that triple splendour of scintillation, what was most conspicuous, most admirable, and all-dominating, was the infinitely varied loveliness of the unclad arms and shoulders. Here was a cold, anÆmic white resembling glacial marble, which froze the glance that looked upon it; here was a pearly skin, polished and transparent, whose colour no shadow could ever change; then came a firm white, under which flowed the rich blood as red cloth appears under a thin white fabric; elsewhere, a smooth, even surface, indicative of a moderate temperament and a moderate temperature, which nothing could affect; elsewhere again, an opaque white, here and there marbled with slabs of pink; elsewhere still, a complexion neither dark nor fair, but cloudy, as though the blood rolled over a bed of black earth; yet again elsewhere, a bright, handsome, striking complexion, like a heavy, thick magnolia-leaf, like the well-nourished flesh of ripe fruit.

All the moulded loveliness emerged from the bodices as though softly escaping from bondage; it flowered from the shoulder-sleeves and the billowing gauze as out of a calyx; in its luxuriance and spontaneousness it was like the richest out-blossoming of anything in the vegetable kingdom. Repeated in all tints three-hundred-fold, it assumed a character of general, complete loveliness, like that of a great forest; the individual disappeared, personality was absorbed.

Nothing—it might be supposed—could have more enraptured the eye, nothing so effectively set the imagination rioting, with regard to individual charms; but, instead, there was sounded the grand note of the whole of woman's beauty, which the senses cannot grasp, but the spirit grasps, a united chorus blending all voices, white, pink and red, into a single voice.

In vain did the dense black and white rows of men, under the band, behind the benches, in the doorways, strive to recognise a certain face or person, the person, the woman. They, the men, were able to see nothing but a great blaze of jewellery, which killed everything else; they merely saw the sex as a single woman with naked arms and shoulders, although they were in the presence of three hundred low-necked women together.

But a sudden silence ensued: the three hundred women were struck stark, with unblinking eyes glued to the door at the back. The band intoned the beginning of a flourish, clear, loud, and martial, which was of singular effect in that silence, that essentially feminine display. The three hundred ladies rose as one, with a rustle of dresses; and then they stood waiting, one close against the other, all smiles, with shoulders so high that they seemed escaping from the sleeves, arms hanging listlessly down, faces beautifully and unalterably serene. Behind them, under the band, and in the doorways, the black and white masses of men swayed silently to and fro. The moment of anticipation seemed interminable. Then in the door at the back appeared something effulgent, a multiplied and concentrated effulgence, like the vision of a comet; and as the exalted, irradiant apparition made a bow of supremest grace, the glittering hedge of jewels, the close array of gems, the starry pageant, bowed low. To the eternally feminine in one was reverence paid by the eternally feminine in number. The men looked on in agitation.

Standing on the tips of his toes, Francesco Sangiorgio was attempting to discover the sweetest of women. He was with a group of deputies. The Honourable Galvagna, a Colonel from the Irredentist part of the country, and the Honourable Sangarzia, were patiently waiting to reach the ladies. The Honourable San Demetrio was about to dispense gallantry in the diplomatic circle; but Sangiorgio was seeking out Angelica.

All those women, standing in a row, with nosegay in hand, smiling as they watched the royal quadrille, confused Sangiorgio; he could distinguish none of their features, recognised not one of them. Never had he seen so many women in a body, so closely ranged together, in all the splendours of beauty and dress, in all the potency of their sex. Every now and then he shut his dazzled eyes; reopening them, he again attempted to seek out the most beautiful of them all, her who, to him, was the only woman.

Of a sudden, while Her Majesty was gracefully dancing round the gray-headed, urbane German Ambassador, her long, regal, flame-coloured train flashing like the tail of a comet, and the royal diadem astrally akindle, Sangiorgio caught sight of Donna Angelica Vargas on the arm of a bronzed old gentleman with dyed moustache and bristles on his head that were a shade of black tending to red. Donna Angelica was figuring in the royal quadrille, opposite the very fair, very pale Hamlet-faced lady who was the Swedish Envoy's wife.

Donna Angelica crossed the floor with the harmonious, almost musical glide that rendered her step one of her most potent charms; her white, brocaded train undulated gently behind her, as though it were aflow, and in it glittered streaks of silver worked into the brocade.

Now and then, as the stately slow promenade, which constituted the royal quadrille, might permit, he saw Donna Angelica's nimble, youthful figure, and the white brocade bodice, modestly cut and topped with a hazy fluff of white gauze; on her white throat a necklace of pearls lay against a pearly skin, and a diamond cross hung luminous upon her breast.

Donna Angelica, her chestnut-brown hair closely coiled round her head, was crowned with stars—brilliant stars of diamonds, studding the darkness of her locks, four in front, four at the back, set irregularly and without design, as stars actually appear in the obscurity of night on the dark, deep blue of the firmament of heaven.

And the penetrating eye of her lover clearly distinguished on the gauze about the throat a tiny spray of lilies of the valley, without leaves, a scarce visible little spray of lilies of the valley, put there for the poetry and perfume of a flower's sake, put there for discovery by the eye of him who knew how to love.

And amid such wealth of beauty, here mild and simple, there provokingly alluring, amid such an exuberance of beauty and seductions, Donna Angelica was beauty undefiled and pensive; beauty was in her melancholy, frank expression, in the peace of a soul that had won its battle. She was the picture of purity. Her dress was a rich, dull white of plain and unpretentious pattern. Between the seams ran silver threads here and there, like gentle thoughts, varying the sameness of such simplicity. The noble folds of her train had a classical aspect, such as the drapery of a chaste, antique statue. Her bodice was of exactly the right cut, in nothing diminishing the attractions of the woman, and being entirely to the credit of the modesty of the lady. About the shoulders the dress was heavy enough to conceal the enticing, almost sensual place where a woman's shoulder becomes her arm. She wore the lightest of cream-coloured gloves of the finest kind, which, covering her elbow and three inches besides, lay moulded to her arm without a wrinkle. She wore no bracelets, but had on plain diamond earrings. The whole impression was one of chastity. There was none of the vacant stupidity of a cross-grained girl, but all the innocence of thought and emotion of a pure woman. To Francesco Sangiorgio it seemed as if he were in the presence of purity personified. Her eyes shed a soft light, her eyelids moved slowly, dispassionately, without a shadow under them of sleeplessness or illness; she looked placidly at the persons and objects surrounding her; her temples were as clear as a child's, and the skin as transparent as the skin round an egg; seen in profile her face showed a delicate pink at the nostril; her sinuous red mouth was shut lightly, like the bud of a flower. And the whole expression of her peaceful countenance was that of a person cherishing neither hopes nor desires. An aureole of something more than human, of something entirely spiritual, seemed to transfigure her loveliness.

At the sight of her, Francesco Sangiorgio felt the excruciating desire yield which had possessed him in the dining-room, where he had been on the rack of expectation concerning Angelica, who had left the house without showing herself. Little by little his nerves were quieted, his prickling senses went into a state of languid contemplation. That chastity and purity descended upon Sangiorgio like a refreshing breath, cooling the ardour of passion; affecting him like the beneficence of an innocent caress from the lips of a child, the hand of a sister, or a friend's embrace; invading him like a placid river, gently and silently overflowing its banks. His delirious pulse had abated; the veins in his temples throbbed less violently than before; his wrongful desires of lust had melted away. And while Donna Angelica was standing at rest in the quadrille, he felt her eyes upon him in an open, frank gaze, the which was a clear, steady light dimmed with tenderness. In truth, she was to him in that hour, and for ever, the divine Beatrice.

Sitting in the large, royal armchair, the Queen bent over a little while talking with Donna Clara Tasca, who was beside her on a stool, which was her place as the wife of a Knight of the Annunciation. The ardent Sicilian, with bright, clever eyes, slightly grizzled hair, and mobile features, betraying a thoroughly restless mind, was answering the Queen with great rapidity, bending forward also, and showing respectful attention. The other ladies—of the aristocracy, of diplomacy, and of the political world—collected in groups, were conversing with one another and pretending to be interested, but kept every motion of the Queen assiduously in eye. And as yet they would not dance, refusing offers to do so, wrapt and engrossed as they were in the recollection of the words spoken to them by the Queen. Every woman in the place, whatever her wealth, rank, or beauty, whatever her charms of mind or body, coveted nothing beyond that moment's colloquy with the Queen, in the presence of two thousand people; they all forgot every other hope, wish, interest, or sentiment in the feminine ambition for that minute of conversation in public. The girls only, to whom this honour would not fall, who had come to exhibit their young fascinations, to be gay, to dance, to drown an innocent, romantic, amorous fancy—the girls, instead, were already dancing a waltz round a large circle in the room, amid a fluttering of white, pink, and blue muslin, and shyly kept at a distance from the royal chair. The men walked about, stood in groups, danced, chatted—no one paid any heed to them. After the royal quadrille, Francesco Sangiorgio had squeezed through the serried files of spectators, and had arrived within twenty feet of her when she was talking with the deputy, Count di Carimate, the Lombard nobleman, with a black beard and vague, Socialistic principles. But she, Donna Angelica, was somewhat absent-minded; her eyes were cast down, and occasionally they turned in the direction of the royal personage.

And whenever that star revolved to right or left, whenever she gave the signal for rising, a prolonged thrill ran through the groups of women; they all turned their heads in the direction indicated, many continuing to chatter or to listen; but they stammered when they spoke, for their thoughts were elsewhere. The Queen had gone over to her Ladies-in-Waiting, and sat down in their midst, while they surrounded her standing. They comprised two Americans married to Roman Princes, one of them remarkably fair, and more English than American, the other slender, affable, and well dressed; Donna Vittoria Colonna, with black, diamond eyes; Donna Lavinia di Sora, with pearl-coloured face and pensive, leonine eyes; Countess Genzano, whose charms were artificial and whose hair was yellow; Princess Seraphita, of classically ideal features, robed in plain white, with a bunch of violets at her bosom; Princess Lalla, whose regular, cameo-lined face was still youthful, and whose shoulders were white and arched; and finally the Marchioness of Paola, the head Lady-in-Waiting, a happy mother with hair yet fair and wavy, whose sprightly daughters, both brunettes, were dancing in the ballroom.

The women of the corps diplomatique were patiently smoothing their gloves on their arms, opening and closing their large, soft, feather fans, each for the hundredth time eagerly scanning her programme, as if she had never seen it before.

By degrees Sangiorgio had reached Donna Angelica's side, where, after arriving, he whispered 'Good-evening.'

'Good-evening,' she murmured, with that depth of expression quite individual to herself. And she turned to him, asking him whether her husband had come, talking with half-closed lips, while he cast such enamored and admiring glances at her that a slight blush tinged her cheeks. The Queen was speaking in French to the French Ambassadress, a spare, ascetic woman with a long face; yonder the King was conversing with Donna Luigia Catalani, attired in bronze, a strange blue feather in her blonde locks; the vivacious, witty Sicilian was smiling maliciously. A new quadrille was beginning.

'You are not dancing,' observed Sangiorgio.

'No, I am not; the Government does not dance this time,' she replied calmly. 'Later on, if you like, we will take a turn.'

'Later on?'

'Yes, later on.'

He did not understand at first. He had been too unobservant, his thoughts all centred on her he loved; he had been unwitting of the scene of feverish female ambition all round him. Yet he saw that something of supreme importance was happening in this essentially feminine festive affair; he saw that these women were completely given over to some idea which made them forget even their wish to look beautiful. The ballroom was now alive with dancers, and the rest of the men were moving towards the sitting, smoking, and refreshment rooms.

On the right side of the ballroom the throng of expectant women was still increasing; they were crowded together closer than ever, and, while they still hoped their turn was coming, had no inclination to dance, since their hearts and minds were over in that corner of the room.

The Queen, sitting in the recess of a balcony, with only her train and the lock of her necklace showing, was conversing with Donna Lidia, the Prime Minister's wife, a hearty, amiable little woman, who only left her quiet family home on the occasion of official routs.

'That is Donna Lidia—the Queen is talking to Donna Lidia!' the women and those of the girls who were well informed were whispering to each other. The interview had thus far lasted five minutes; the eyes of all the waiting ladies were, by an irresistible, magnetic force, drawn upon Donna Lidia and her Queen, whose movements were subject to general speculation: would she go to the right or the left when she got up to leave the alcove? In the ballroom the couples who had taken part in the quadrille were now promenading; engagements were being made for the polka; the young men were writing with pencils on the girls' programmes; the ladies who were strangers, or elderly, middle-aged, or old, sat on the last row of the red velvet benches with the formal air of people voluntarily bored, and were laden with jewels and splendid laces, and wore feathers in their hair. The women who had been honoured by a few words from royalty went about flushed and smiling and satisfied, with a happy light in their eyes, repeating to one another the gracious remarks that had been made to them; and they cared nothing for anything else, paid no heed to others who were still waiting with ill-concealed impatience. The King was talking to the large, handsome wife of Italy's prime patriot, a worthy lady, with dark skin and honest eyes, dressed all in blue.

'I had hoped to see you before, this evening,' said Sangiorgio, like a very schoolboy.

'Ah, indeed,' she vaguely replied.

At that she turned her back upon him. A path had suddenly opened through the crowd, and between two rows of people the Queen was advancing, majestically and gracefully beautiful, in a tremulous, starry radiance. She was coming towards Donna Angelica, and Sangiorgio stepped back, abashed, recognising in that female couple—the simple, serene woman and the royal, smiling woman—the whole potency of the sex.

Later on Francesco Sangiorgio and Donna Angelica were walking through the rooms together at a leisurely pace, wending their way through the maze of trains which formed little lanes on the floor, occasionally coming to a standstill when the flood of femininity barred their passage. In the great ballroom, the girls, the secretaries' wives, the ladies in love with balls, the women of the middle class, and all those who had no official position, gave themselves up entirely to the pleasures of dancing; the orchestra was playing lively tunes by MÉtra and Fahrbach; the animation of the affair was at its height. Others were meanwhile promenading, sitting on lounges in the parlours, holding receptions, and circulating everywhere. The British Ambassadress, with her beautiful and poetic daughter by her side, who resembled a Botticelli Madonna, was holding court in the blue-room to a circle of young diplomats. For two minutes these ladies spoke English with Donna Angelica; Sangiorgio listened without understanding, but what he heard sounded like delicious music to him.

The Countess di Malgra, the sympathetic blonde of interesting pallor and bewitching eyes, was dispensing social paradoxes to three or four young Centrist deputies following in her train; Signorina Maria Gaston, a girl of gentle loveliness, the daughter of the Minister of Marine, a mundanely agreeable little angel, was not dancing, but was chatting at a window with three or four old Admirals; Signora Giulia Greuze, the Belgian with a sparkling wit and a beautiful young body, like a rose bursting from its bud, was laughing under a hanging basket of ivy, showing her frank teeth.

Donna Angelica, on Sangiorgio's arm, went on, stopping a moment here and there, exchanging bows and smiles with the deputies' wives she met. The little Marchioness di Santa Marta, fair and fluffy, like a young bird, faithful to her taste for dark-red dresses, showing the prettiest little feet in the Italian political world; the Baroness Romito, a gorgeous, sedate Juno; the Countess di Trecastagne, a pale Frenchwoman, married to a Sicilian; the Baroness di Sparanise, the clever lady whose eyes were black as Egyptian night; the mild and affable Marchioness di Costanza, with her caressing voice and gentle footsteps; the two fair-haired daughters of the Minister of Grace and Justice, one blonde and slender, the other blonde and pensive—all these were walking about, without returning to the ballroom, occasionally gathering in groups, laughing together, telling little stories of the evening, looking one another all over with kind though searching smiles, correctly appraising one another's magnificence and beauty.

Donna Clara Tasca had stayed half an hour, had chatted with some Ministers, politicians, and deputies, and had left abruptly, following Don Mario, whose political fortune she would certainly have made if he had been less nebulous, fantastic, and virtuous in his politics.

Donna Angelica, on Sangiorgio's arm, spoke little, but he asked for nothing more, happy at feeling that modestly-gloved arm on his coat-sleeve, happy at being able to count the pearls in her necklace, happy in the sensation of his foot being grazed by the hem of her brocaded dress. She cast about for her husband, though very dispassionately, without urgency, and without making inquiries of anyone, exchanging but a few occasional phrases with her escort. At length Don Silvio, arm-in-arm with a deputy of the Opposition, appeared in a doorway, came up to her, and, scarcely looking at her, scarcely noticing in whose company she was, asked her curtly in an undertone:

'Her Majesty?'

'Most amiable,' she answered, casting her eyes down.

'More so than usual?'

'I do not know—I think——'

'Well, do you think, or are you sure?' he interrupted severely.

'I am sure—quite sure,' she hastened to say.

He turned his back upon her; she was pale and agitated.

'Would you like to sit down, perhaps?' asked Sangiorgio reverently.

'No, no,' she said; 'let us walk—let us walk.'

They went into a refreshment-room full of people nibbling or nipping at sweetmeats, ices, coffee, or tea, where the floor was strewn with little bags of sweets. Here, too, women abounded. Princess Valmy was sipping tea and arguing with a little man who was a renowned translator of Plato, a Parliamentary athlete, a Southerner of deep intellect, rather strident voice, and incisive, oft cutting, language. The Countess di Roccamorice was eating sugared chestnuts as she chatted with the Grand Master of the Order of St. Maurice, with his white beard and discreet Lombard smile. The Princess di Rocco, the handsomest woman in Rome, was reclining in an easy-chair, with the Honourable Melillo, the Honourable Marchetti, and the Honourable Sangarzia in attendance; she was consuming an ice, benevolent and placid as a goddess. The Baroness Noir, tiny and frail, in a dress of Japanese blue, with gorgeous jewels—large turquoises set in diamonds—was slapping her fingers with her fan, nervously listening to an argument between the Italian Minister at Brussels and the Italian Minister at Bucharest.

'I want nothing—I want nothing,' she murmured to Sangiorgio, who was conducting her towards the well-laden table.

She was trying to overcome her agitation by degrees. She spoke for a moment with Signora Gasperini, the Secretary-General's wife, thus trying to recover her calm; but she was no more than half successful. Deep down in her soul she was still perturbed.

'Would you like to leave?' Sangiorgio asked her.

'Oh yes!' she exclaimed impulsively.

They resumed their search for Don Silvio, traversed the red room, the blue room, the ballroom, and the corridor with the statues, where the cold made her naked shoulders shiver, and then passed through three or four empty apartments, arriving in the banqueting chamber, where folks were merrily chattering and glasses were clinking. They turned back, and finally, in the Don Quixote tapestry room, found Don Silvio in spirited debate with the British Ambassador. Donna Angelica was about to accost him, when, by a wink, her husband forbade her to do so, giving her to understand that she was to move on. Blushing, she inclined her head, and took Sangiorgio quickly away.

'Do you not dance?' she laughingly asked him. 'You are too serious! What is it you are so deep in thought about? Politics, I hope!'

'Oh no!'

'Well, on no account think of politics, I beg you!' she said, leaning more emphatically on his arm. 'You are not in love, are you, by any chance?'

'Yes,' he briefly replied.

She stopped, put out of countenance, regretting she had said too much. And then she immediately turned to other subjects—the ball, the tapestries, Don Quixote, the heat of the rooms, and all manner of things, speaking in a voice that was somewhat veiled.

By two o'clock in the morning the ball was at its height; in the ballroom some forty couples were waltzing, and in all the apartments, among hangings, flower-pots, embroidered curtains, white stucco, and gilt decorations, there was an abounding, a teeming, an overflowing of women, a glitter of starred headdresses, a heaving of lustrous female bosoms.

Just then Vargas' secretary came up to her with his officious demeanour.

'His Excellency is obliged to go to his office at once because of an important telegram. He will not be able to take you home.'

And deferentially he stood waiting, but as if conscious of being dispensable, to be asked to take her home.

'Very well,' she replied, dismissing him with a glance.

Sangiorgio silently accompanied her to the waiting-room, where, under the white electric light, and in the presence of the stolid, almost automatic footmen, he assisted her in putting on her heavy, ermine-lined, white brocade cloak. Without explanations, without a word passing between them, she took his arm again, and calmly descended the staircase, the Vargas groom having preceded them to call the carriage. Arrived at the open door of the brougham, with a gentle, rapid motion she gathered up her train, and stepped into the carriage; she did not bow to Francesco, did not offer him her hand, and he stepped into the carriage after her—quite naturally.

Not a word was spoken; but her white train covered Francesco Sangiorgio's feet and legs and the bottom of the small carriage with its rich folds; in that small space, a faint odour of lilies of the valley was noticeable.

She had nothing over her hair, neither shawl nor hood nor lace wrapper; her bare head emerged freely from the white of the ermine, and in her dark locks sparkled the diamond stars. From the ample sleeves of the cloak her hands fell on her knees, one hand still in its light glove of Swedish kid; the other was gloveless, with a scintillant diamond ring on the third finger. In the semi-darkness of the carriage, which was making for old Rome from the Quirinal hill at a slow trot, Francesco Sangiorgio dwelt now on that sweet face, whose continued pallor rendered it more fascinating than ever, and now on that little hand, lying as listlessly in her lap as if she were overcome with mortal fatigue. In the long-awaited rapture of that moment, in the strange seclusion of the dark little blue nest, conveying the sweetest of her sex homeward, her lover was seized with not a single desire, with no care for the time which was speeding and bringing separation nearer. That supreme spiritual pleasure he was drinking in, that great happiness was quite without alloy.

Motionless and mute he sat, with his eyes enchained, as it were by a spell, seeing nothing but that white face, and that small, soft white hand, which seemed asleep; he neither stirred nor spoke, a Buddhist of love, since there was naught to hinder the loftiest feelings.

Never had he known his life to unfold and run its course so smoothly, like a broad, smiling river, flowing down to the sea through a beautiful green plain in the sunlight, barely rippling under the willows. Never had he felt himself thus enthralled by pure bliss, in which soul and senses were alike assuaged, to the delight of heart and emotion. He quaffed deeply and exhaustively that cup of joy in the quiescence and passivity of complete happiness.

Donna Angelica from time to time gave him a lingering look. Nestling in her corner, but neither curled nor huddled up, with that beauty of shape and pose peculiar to her, her attitude was one of rest; it was not too loose and not too stiff. She was not asleep—oh no; her large, dark eyes were wide open, and every now and then fell quietly on him who loved her. But all the lines of her face had seemingly become softened and rounded in that state of repose.

Like children, like some women whose features relax and grow young again in sleep, whose faces then seem innocent and artless once more, so, in that unruffled moment, she looked like a little girl, like an ingenuous young creature still growing up. She no longer appeared as a woman bedizened in ballroom finery; her cloak might have been a schoolgirl's frock, plain and unpretentious, shapeless and chaste, a maiden's mantle; and the gleam of the diamonds in her dark hair and on her little hand was like a ray of light, not the fulgurant opulence of jewellery. She was a young girl once more, in the pure, spiritual essence of beauty and grace, in a state of repose that was also a new birth. No flame lit up those lovely eyes, so full of peace, chiselled like a statue's. She, too, was very tranquil; her small hand was as wax against the white of her gown; her face was outlined like a luminous oval against the dark background of the carriage, and what she thought or felt was unrevealed. Beneath that external composure, beneath the repose of those lines, perhaps thought was astir, perhaps a heart was beating strongly, perhaps a great inner, intellectual and emotional life was going through all the stages of activity. Yet, perhaps, this calm and peace had reached her very spirit; perhaps within her she likened the depths of a fathomless, steely lake, which no tempest could ever disturb. Nothing was certain, however. She was, as always, enwrapped in the great mystery of her own serenity.

Between them both, between the happy mortal who was suffering himself to be engulfed in the whelming flood of spiritual bliss that stole over him, and the young, chaste, placid, and serene being, sat a third—Love.

---

CHAPTER III

Scarcely had Francesco Sangiorgio emerged from the Via Babuino into the Piazza del Popolo than a handful of coriander seeds went down his neck, although he could not tell whence they came; a loose bunch of chicory-flowers then grazed his cheek, and in the rush of people he was borne away towards the obelisk. A black, noisy, shouting, whistling mob was surging round the fountain under a white shower of coriander seeds thrown by pedestrians, from carriages, and from the two great wooden stands which, as it were, formed a prolongation of the Corso to the fountain.

This dark crowd, with its excited faces, was shone upon by the afternoon sunlight, which covered the square with a cheerful spring cape, and in the tepid air, in the mild February sirocco, the grains of pulverized coriander inflamed the throat and drew blood to the cheeks. Sangiorgio was obliged to use elbows and shoulders in pushing his way through the howling mob, which jerked and jostled him; he was seized with wrath against an amusement so brutal as to outdo the ferocity of animals at play.

The crowd reached to the Pincio gates, obstructing them, barring them, clinging to the open railings, turning their backs upon both the avenues; but no one went in, no one thought of going up to the Pincio, all being impressed by the extraordinary spectacle which is always afforded by an unbridled human mob. Sangiorgio made his way energetically against the tide, putting a mighty restraint on himself not to distribute fisticuffs among those who hustled him. But the great difficulty for him was to get into the Pincio; the people who blocked the entrance would not let him pass—were afraid of losing their places, suspecting him of wanting to steal one, believing he wished to establish himself there, not for a moment imagining that he merely wanted to walk about inside.

How could a man have the strange taste to walk in the deserted Pincio, on that holiday, at that warm afternoon hour, when everybody was mad with carnival mirth, from the Piazza Venezia to the Piazza del Popolo? The crowd was incredulous of such eccentricity, and refused to let Francesco Sangiorgio pass. Two or three times he shouted, his cheeks flushed with anger:

'I am going to the Pincio! I am going to the Pincio!'

He went in. No sooner had he rounded the corner of the avenue than a great sigh of relief escaped his breast, and a sense of tranquillity settled upon his overwrought nerves. He was entering upon the green, sloping solitude of the broad avenue, under the soft shadows of the elms, budding out anew in the anticipation of spring.

Not a soul was to be seen in the avenue, which in one direction went towards the Villa Medici and the Trinita dei Monti, and in the other up to the Pincio; there was not a single passer-by, not a woman, not a child. Everyone, everyone was in the Corso, in the street, doorways, balconies, loggias, on the improvised stands, on the pedestals of lamp-posts, on the backs of carriages; everyone, everyone was in the Corso, seized with carnival madness.

Francesco Sangiorgio felt more and more at ease and peace, as he ascended to that place of rural solitude. Now and then a shred of an echo reached him, from the Piazza del Popolo, of shrill, piercing voices dampened by distance; but as he went further away the echoes diminished, became quite faint, and then died. To anyone skirting the wall that overlooks the Piazza del Popolo, down below there still was visible a great black, struggling mass, and a great, transparent, white haze, a white, low haze, such as might hover over a swamp.

On the ample terrace, broad and cheerful, which is almost a plain, which commands a view of Rome, St. Peter's, the Vatican, Monte Mario, and all the Campagna adjacent to the Tiber, besides the Flaminian gate, a poorly-clad old man was sitting on a bench, under a tree. His walking-stick was left to itself between his legs, the sun was beating down on his face, and he had closed his eyes, succumbing to age, the warmth, and sleep. Leaning, or more properly lying, on the broad baluster of the terrace, a priest was looking at Rome, a little black spot in front of the large white spot that the city appeared, bathed in the mellow afternoon sunshine. Francesco Sangiorgio went up to the priest to see who he was; he found a pale, thin youth, with freckled face; but he was looking neither at Rome nor the indistinct, dark mass swaying in the Piazza del Popolo; he was reading his breviary, a stout book bound in black, with yellow leaves. Sangiorgio moved on quickly, feeling safer than ever. Indeed, in that whole garden, favoured by nurses, governesses, and maid-servants, and adored by children, reigned the stillness of a deserted park, from which every sound and every sign of life had disappeared.

The large circular space where the band plays looked as if it had been unoccupied for years; the iron desks used for concerts were standing about in disorder and rusted, as if they had for an indefinite length of time been exposed to sun and rain, without ever being touched by the hand of man; the little stall belonging to the indiarubber ball, hoop, and skipping-rope vendor was untenanted, and the wares hung on a tree with no one to think of selling, buying, or stealing them; the merry-go-round was at a standstill, silent, deserted, with its hideous blue-and-red horses; the rope of the swing was dragging down as if weeping at being forsaken. On other days this juvenile playground was enlivened with childish shrieks, loud laughter, maternal calls, merry voices; now children and mothers and servants were down below there, lost in the great vortex of the carnival, seeming to have forgotten their delightful, verdant retreat, when the nascent spring-tide was calling everything into bloom.

At the tiny lake, there was no one to throw bread-crumbs to the handsome white swan, which bent its neck so gracefully, like a drooping maiden, and swam so deliberately about its small stagnant pond; the swan looked worn and sad, as though it missed the gentle hands of the creatures wont to feed it. The water-dial, dirty and splashed, pointed to a quarter-past five—of what day, what year? One of the wheels was broken. No one at all was sitting in the shade of the Swiss cottage so much liked by the strange German seminarists who dress in red, and the pupils of the Nazzareno College; and from the railing separating the ground of the Villa Medici from the Pincio a long, dark, dank avenue was in sight. Under the plane-trees, the marble figures of Mercury, with cheeks rather washed out by the rains, with their curly locks blackened by the dampness, looked as if they had for centuries been tired of standing there.

And Francesco Sangiorgio was glad of these solitary, rural surroundings, alive with new sap as befitted the soft season. The large garden, with its spacious walks, seemed entirely his own, left to him by the roistering multitude, apt for the concealment of his loves, the secluded nest of a pure, sentimental idyll. From afar, from the rear terrace, he had reviewed the immense green body of foliage of the Villa Borghese, where it would have been easy to hide; but she had declined, so as not to be obliged to cross the Piazza del Popolo on that horrible carnival day, although the Villa Borghese gardens—yet more than the Pincio—then resembled a huge natural park, untrodden by man, a vast lonely tract of virgin country.

Passing the dividing line between the Pincio and the Villa Medici, Sangiorgio cast a regretful glance at the gloomy darkness of the dense alley of trees where his sweet idyll would have been safe from the bright, lavish sunlight, but she had refused, since a special permit would have been requisite for the Villa Medici. What disturbed Sangiorgio, in his walk round the big garden, was the part which faced Rome and the Piazza del Popolo, all that open side, that gigantic breach, whence at moments came a deep drone, the clamour of the crowd in its mirth or disappointment. Each time he turned towards the Villa Borghese, he seemed to be in peace, alone with his love, unmolested in the beneficent, rural solitude. Whenever he turned back towards Rome, the sudden view of the city and the drone and the whole of the unwelcome outer world spoiled all his dreams. That public, that crowd, meant to him obstacles, difficulties, pain.

When she arrived, he had been awaiting her for an hour, but had not been impatient, being still unfamiliar with the torture of waiting in uncertainty, still a believer in woman's word.

She came by the avenue leading to the Trinita dei Monti, having left her carriage in the Piazza di Spagna; she was dressed in dark-blue cloth, with a thin white veil over her face, which made her look younger; she walked softly, without any movement of her skirts, as though she were gliding over the ground, not coming but approaching. At a certain moment, both raised their eyes at once, and their glances met at a distance of thirty paces. She at once cast her eyes down, without hastening her step; he did not stir from the little buttress he had been leaning against, as he waited for her, watching her advance in her dark dress, in her youthful white veil. Surely she was a spring flower, a large human flower blooming for his special delight.

When they met, they neither bowed nor put out their hands; her small fist clasped the handle of her sunshade, a miniature cock carved in wood, with a red comb; they did not speak as they walked together, without looking at one another.

'Thank you,' said he.

'No, no,' she answered quickly, and, looking round with a timid glance, she added: 'Everybody will see us here.'

'There is no one; do not be afraid.'

'No one?'

'No one—because of the carnival.'

'True, they are all in the Corso; I was to have gone, too.'

And she stopped on the broad, sunny terrace, whence they could view the whole, great, riotous sea of the populace in the Piazza del Popolo. He felt a pang at his heart, as if the sight robbed him of a portion of his happiness. She laid her slender hand, gloved in chamois, on the parapet, and gazed upon the great, dark floods of people, from which a noise rose up as of a volcano.

'How they are enjoying themselves down there,' she murmured sadly.

He waited behind her, seized with a fit of impatience.

'Come away, come away,' he urged.

She turned her back to the city, and accompanied him to the large avenue at the left; she kept her eyes on the ground as if wrapt in thought.

'No, there is nobody about,' she said, as though in relief. 'It is fortunate that it is carnival time. The people are nearly mad. Would you not rather be down there?'

'How can you possibly believe——?' he began in an injured tone.

'There are many things I can no longer believe in,' she whispered, as though in self-communion.

'You are so kind; I do not know what to say; be merciful,' he begged, with the humility of a Christian before the Blessed Image.

'I have sad tidings to tell you, my friend,' she continued, with her beautiful, sympathetic voice.

'Not to-day, not to-day—to-morrow—another day——'

'Better to-day than to-morrow,' she interposed, settling her lovely, mild eyes upon the Villa Borghese gardens. 'You must have courage.'

'I have none, none at all——'

'You must,' she insisted, 'in order to be at peace with your conscience.'

And with a shiver she wrapped her little fur pelisse about her, since they were passing close to the sombre, chilly region of the Villa Medici.

'Conscience, conscience!' he exclaimed rebelliously. 'And what of love?'

'We must not love,' she said sententiously.

'And why not?'

'Because they will not allow it.'

'Who will not allow it?'

'They.' And, pointing with her finger, she indicated Rome and the Piazza del Popolo, where the carnival fever was at its height.

'But you do not know who they are.'

'They are our conscience: I could never endure doing wrong for the sake of love.'

'You do not love,' he bitterly remarked.

'Perhaps,' she said, lost in contemplation of Monte Mario.

'Come away, come away,' he repeated, seized with a spasm of repentance, and desirous of drawing her away from the spectacle of the crowd.

Indeed, as she turned her back upon the panorama of Rome, her face cleared, and her thoughts seemed to flow in a brighter channel. The great peace of the Pincian hill, the solitude, the first breath of spring, the sweet afternoon in the green, the tepid air, the looks of love and respect he bestowed upon her, the fidelity which he manifested, the amorous reverence with which he spoke to her, made her forget the tumult and the shouting of the carnival-smitten town, made her forget that another world existed besides the country, besides spring, besides love.

He understood—oh yes—that a little of that soul was his, that it inclined towards him, in that deserted place, in the presence of the foliage, the falling waters of the fountain, the brazen, open horizon. But he divined that some of that feminine soul escaped him, that most of that heart was closed against him.

In this solitude, amid the new budding of tree and flower, where Nature was so full of charm, she was kind, and sweet, and affectionately sympathetic. But at the sight of that hard, malignant city, that never forgives, she summoned up all her courage to maintain herself inflexible, stiffened in her purpose to demand and insure the sacrifice of love. For this reason he did his utmost not to let her return to the terrace and to the view upon the town, persuaded that the hour, weather, and place had a softening influence on her.

'One must not love too late,' she resumed, with melancholy infinitely sweet; 'it is useless and painful. Where were you five years ago?'

'Down there in the Basilicata,' he replied, with a vague gesture.

'And I was up there—up there in the mountains, among the snows. I believed in the snows of the glaciers, the invincible glaciers. I married Don Silvio; he was kind; I knew nothing of the sun. Now the sun has come to me too late.'

'Do not say so—do not say so!' he implored.

'We must not turn the snow into mud, my friend.'

Then there was silence. He became extremely pale, as though he were dying. Her eyes were full of tears; and he gazed into the brimming orbs, trembling at the sight of those flowing tears, as distressed as if his last hour had come.

But he did not tell her how he was suffering; he would not, could not complain; everything that came from her was good, was sweet. With the profound unselfishness of true, strong love, he forgot all his own griefs when he looked at those lovely, tearful eyes, saw the mournful droop of those lips. Her sorrow spurred him and lifted him up; he was carried away by a powerful, voluptuous thrill of sentiment.

'Life is very hard for me, I must tell you,' she continued faintly, as if her emotions had overpowered her. 'I have no children to keep my heart warm with a mother's love. I have an old man who is utterly cold towards me; he is entirely taken up with his passion for something else, for another idea. Oh, if you only knew, my friend, what this solitude means, this eternal silence!'

'But why do you submit?'

'Because I do,' she said, as if this were the inscrutable decree of fate.

And she went on walking, speechless and still slower, as though succumbing to fatigue; he kept by her side, without seeing or hearing anything further, his mind and his senses a blank.

The sun was setting behind St. Peter's, between the church and Monte Mario.

'It is over, my friend—all over. I almost feel as if I were dead. People see my placid face, my invariable calmness, and they must know nothing more; they must never guess the truth. But there is nothing left in here.'

And she tapped her cloak over the place where her heart was. She was unaware what a cruel blow she had dealt the enamoured man in telling him she could never love him. At that hour and that spot she was yielding to one of the melancholy and egoistic outbursts of self-contained spirits; she had lost sight of her companion; she gave herself up to all the private woes of a disenchanted young soul.

'But,' he murmured, 'you have a disinterested, steadfast friend, whose devotion will stand any test; whatever you wish, he wishes; his desire to help you, humbly, secretly, knows no limit——'

And he stopped short, because his voice quavered, because his words choked him, because this, his unspeakable love, threatened to overleap all bounds.

'Thank you—thank you,' she said, a sad smile lighting up her countenance; 'I know it.'

'You cannot—cannot know. I have never told you. I never shall tell you. I never could tell you. I only assure you that it is devotion of the deepest kind. Why reject it? How can you refuse it?'

'Because it is too much like love, my friend.'

'Love is not mentioned.'

'It can be inferred.'

'You must not understand it so; you must not infer thus. I am asking nothing; I want no more than to be allowed to give you this devotion.'

'So you say to-day; to-morrow love will demand love.'

'Who says so?'

'Ah me! Experience, my friend!'

'Experience lies!' exclaimed the other, with violence. 'My love is like no other.'

Angelica bowed her head for a moment as if convinced, and Sangiorgio repented his violence.

'Forgive me,' he humbly said, 'but the idea of losing you is unendurable.'

'But we must part—better now than later. Later on we should suffer much more; I should be more in the wrong, and you would have a better right to accuse me. Habit aggravates and intensifies love. A day would come when we could not possibly separate—a day of exultation for you, of shame for me. Now—we are still free. What are we to each other? Nothing—and it is best so. We have seen one another four or five times——'

'I have always seen you.'

'In the midst of life's frivolities——'

'I wept with you when you wept in the Pantheon.'

'Among inquisitive, evil-minded people——'

'I watched you for an hour, that day, from the Ponte Nomentano, when you let the rose-leaves drift on the current of the Aniene. You were alone—we were alone——'

'Among the conventional formalities of political life——'

'How lovely you were that night at the Quirinal ball! I went away with you. You did not speak. You said nothing to me. How lovely you were!'

'It is a dream—it is a dream,' she returned, inspired to the sacrifice by his vibrant words of love. 'We must awake; we must part.'

'Then it is death.'

'Who is speaking of death?'

He did not answer her question, but she understood his look of pain and reproach. The sun had set, and the great purple, crepuscular shrouds now rose from the earth to the white sky; a cold, noxious breeze sprang up; from the terrace the priest had vanished, the reader of the breviary; from the wooden bench the old man had vanished, the whole Pincian hill was becoming dark, and down below the crowd was howling louder than ever, excited at the coming of evening. She prepared to leave by the broad road to the Trinita dei Monti, but he went with her, as if bewitched, without a word, but intent upon going anywhere with her. At the stone buttress where she had met him, she turned, and put out her hand:

'Good-bye, my friend.'

'No, not good-bye!'

'It is late,' said the beloved voice in a measured tone.

And Angelica was lost in the vapours of evenfall.

* * * * *

From the Piazza del Popolo to the Piazza di Venezia the little candles were now being lit. There were a myriad tiny points of fire, wandering flamelets, in the streets, on verandas, balconies, carts; tiny, nondescript, dirty bundles flew about; long-handled fans were active; handkerchiefs and rags were in motion; there was jumping about and puffing out of mouths—all manner of contrivances, all pranks, all sorts of violence and brutality were indulged in to extinguish the candles. And the shouts of resistance and attack sounded in the universal human echo:

'Candles, candles, candles!'

Through all the lights, all the uproar, and all the tumultuous merry-making, a poor mortal was making his way, agonized with pain, unconsciously pushed about, shouldered, jostled.

---

CHAPTER IV

Three times they had met on the great road, lined with elms and plane-trees, which skirts the Tiber. She would leave her carriage before it reached the Milvio Bridge, and send her coachman back to wait for her in the Piazza San Pietro. She would cross the bridge on foot, looking about for him at the same time. To-day he had been waiting there for two hours, crazed with impatience and his intense desire of being in her company, walking to and fro opposite the Morteo Tavern, taking a turn in the Via di Tor di Quinto, going back as far as the bridge, reaching the point where the Flaminian Way begins, turning back again, casting restless glances all about, at the green willows bending over the river, at the blossoming almond-trees peering over the hedges of the Farnesina, in vain looking steadily in the direction of the Ponte Milvio, where she was to appear. And when he saw her in the distance, sudden blushes inflamed his pale cheeks; he would not go to meet her, but would wait where he stood, pretending absent-mindedness and unconcern.

She always came after missing three or four appointments, was always an hour or an hour and a half late, never apologized, never even alleged the slightest feminine excuse. And he, who was in despair—who up to the last moment had inwardly been accusing her of coldness and indifference, while he stamped his feet in an irresistible fit of nervousness—when he saw her said not a word, but stared at her quite bewitched, compensated by that moment of intense joy for all the suffering endured.

Their first moments together were always embarrassing; they knew not what to say to one another, and walked slowly beneath the trees, she with eyes downcast, her hands plunged in her muff, so as to have an excuse for not taking his arm, he twisting his extinguished cigar between his fingers, and in a blissful state despite Angelica's severity and melancholy.

The Roman spring was gently pervading the atmosphere among the cypresses of the Monte Mario and the plantains of the Monte Parioli, and from the tall hedges by river-bank and countryside emanated a strong scent of white hawthorn. Angelica's first words usually denoted grief, regret, repentance; brief words they were, but earnest, all of them weighing like lead upon her lover's heart. He would remain humbly silent, at a loss what consolation to proffer to the virtuous and saintly lady, whose conscience was stricken with remorse on his account.

She had never spoken of love to him, and never had he asked her for it. Timidity and shamefacedness perpetually restrained him. Perhaps he feared the answer, an answer that might be cruel in its frankness from a woman who was not in love, and whose deep religiosity would not allow her to lie.

Thus it came to be naturally established, in their singular relationship, that Donna Angelica was to give nothing of her heart, and was not to be asked to give any of it; it was tacitly but plainly understood that she should accept, support, and endure his love without ever being under an obligation to return it. She was the blessed image that vouchsafed to lower gracious eyes upon the faithful one; and the faithful one worshipped her more and more, adored her, and spoke to her of his love. Under the big trees of the Via Angelica, along which wound the silvery stream, as they walked on the hard earth amid the odours of the country, and as the sad rocking of Donna Angelica's voice diminished, with bated breath did he speak to her of his love. First came incoherent sentences, broken up by passion, which hastily recorded his feelings and thoughts since he had last seen her, or those he had before been unable to utter in her presence; and while he ejaculated these jerky, almost violent sentences he looked at her with a madman's eyes, for an instant terrifying her. But at the sound of his own voice Sangiorgio took heart of grace; his speech flowed more smoothly, his ideas connected themselves in logical sequence, his love found expression in such plain and convincing eloquence of sentiment that Donna Angelica was reassured by his humble and pleasing language; her face grew red like a young girl's in the pure enjoyment of amorous homage. Meanwhile, she would be picking long green stalks, or a bunch of bright yellow swallow-wort, or clusters of the tiny white flowerets resembling lacework, or some of the poisonous red berries, so attractive to the eye; and he spoke of love, and she suddenly rejuvenated, picked flowers, and occasionally took a flower from her bunch to give to him. He would hold it in his hand, furiously desiring to bite it, and one day he wanted to eat the red berries, so vivid in hue and so alluring.

'Do you want to die?' she said jestingly, but trembling at the same time.

And that apprehension of hers was one of the moral treasures Sangiorgio was gathering together. One day she stood on tip-toe by a short almond tree, and broke off a few sprigs, smelling them for a long time, with a happy smile on her face. Surely she was spring itself, fresh and lightsome! The almond blossom she gave him he added to a dried piece of lily of the valley, a fragment of cloth from a dress, begged and granted as a great favour, and a precious, invaluable object—a cambric pocket-handkerchief, received one evening when he had grown desperate, after three days of futile attempt, and asked for as something to comfort him. She knew this, and was glad in the knowledge. She looked long in the direction of Castel Sant' Angelo, towards the new carabineer barracks, towards old Rome, where the lights were beginning to be lit. But though she might be looking away, she listened to all the words that Sangiorgio spoke so softly, and she nodded her head, like a pleased child. Thus they reached the Porta Angelica, with minds soothed and at peace; he was to take the Via Reale, which leads to the Prati di Castello and the Ripetta, she was to go by the gate on the way to St. Peter's. But their farewell was long and full of tenderness.

One day she arrived all a-tremble. She had met the Honourable Giustini, the half-deformed Tuscan cynic. Her carriage had passed him quickly, yet Giustini had had time to recognise her, and had bowed with an air of astonishment. So much had this unbalanced her that at every step she turned round, imagining every passing peasant to be the hump-backed deputy, and then gazed at her companion in utter fright. He in vain tried to reassure her, to persuade her that a pedestrian could not follow a fast-trotting carriage, that the Flaminian Way was a public thoroughfare, where there was nothing remarkable about meeting a lady driving. Nevertheless, himself was seized with the vague apprehension which attacks lovers in their fullest felicity, and spoils their most innocent joys. That meeting was therefore painful, and the two were unable to settle into their usually tranquil state, and Angelica summarized her fears in this sentence:

'Now Giustini is in the chamber, and is telling everyone, even my husband, that he met me on the Flaminian Way.'

In this unpleasant hour Sangiorgio ventured to tell her that the public highways were no suitable place for their attachment, that it must be concealed in a house, between four walls, far from prying eyes and inquisitive idlers. He spoke with such respectful feeling, such deep deference, such honest candour, that, although she at once briefly answered 'No,' she did so in a quite unoffended tone. She replied 'No' to all the humble proposals he had to offer, saying it slowly and decisively, without anger or vacillation. At a certain point she said, as if vexed:

'Stop it!'

He stopped. They separated without further conversation. But from the fatal hour that she had met Giustini, they felt the awkwardness of pursuing their love affair in public more and more, of trusting to chance, and taking no precautions although the danger was patent. It was a migratory, homeless affair, a vagabond affair that made the waiters lounging about the Morteo CafÉ, at the Ponte Molle, smile ironically, a melancholy affair, whose tender adieus made the vulgar tax-officials at the Porta Angelica laugh.

Two further meetings were very painful. Fear had now settled in Donna Angelica's heart, and made her shudder whenever a waggoner or a huntsman passed by; even the boats on the Tiber frightened her. She was always thinking the boatmen might recognise her, and might salute her by raising their oars. They no longer talked of love. That is to say, he no longer talked of love, since she would interrupt him incessantly, looking round, lowering her head when any carriage with strangers passed, blushing, paling, almost losing her breath.

One day when they had an appointment, it rained hard for an hour before the time. He took shelter under the Morteo doorway, but, unable to control his impatience, went on towards the Ponte Molle, becoming utterly soaked, trying to descry someone through the veil of rain. He saw nobody. She could not possibly have come in such weather, yet he persistently waited, sustained by a vague hope. The rain continued, and, of course, she did not come; but he returned to Rome only at seven o'clock, wet to the skin, in an open tram, with his feet on the sodden floor of the last one from Ponte Molle to Rome, in a very downcast, desolate mood, almost ill. He could not tell her of it that evening, since she was surrounded with people, and so she knew nothing of the dismal hours he had spent in the rain of heaven and the mists of the river.

But the next time he repeated his suggestion she still said 'No,' although unemphatically, as if she were rather answering herself than him. The hour was late and the weather freezing. It was one of those horrible January days transported into April; a lashing north wind was raging, the sky was murky, and the ground soaking and miry. She had on a little velvet cape, which barely protected her neck and shoulders, so that the cold penetrated her from top to toe; her head was bent, and she was holding her pocket-handkerchief to her mouth. Sangiorgio, too, was very cold, in his light spring overcoat, but he did not mention the fact, both of them being disappointed and depressed by the weather. At intervals he asked her:

'You are very cold, are you not?'

'Oh yes,' she replied gently.

'Oh, Lord!' he said, looking about, not knowing what to do to make her warm.

They hastened their steps, but the mud was splashing Donna Angelica's boots and the bottom of her dress, and they could not run. As if accidentally, he brought up the subject of a warm room like his own, like that in the Piazza dell' Apollinare, where a fire was always burning in the hearth, a room where they would be alone.

She made no answer.

'Where?' she finally asked, after a lengthy silence.

He was about to tell her, but checked himself.

'Down there,' he then said, indefinitely pointing to Rome.

Nothing more passed between them. The hour was getting late, and it was growing dark and cold in the deserted Campagna. She was so melancholy and frightened that, for the first time, she passed her arm under her friend's, who received this favour with due humility. Then for three mortal days he did not see her at all. Vargas told him at the Chamber that she was indisposed. The fourth evening he found her alone, for a minute, in a box at the Apollo Theatre; she was pale and looked ill. Behind her large feather fan she confided to him that on her way back from their last tryst she had seen the Honourable Oldofredi near St. Peter's, who had looked her all over and grinned maliciously. Oldofredi was known to be revengeful. Finally, blushing for shame, she expressed doubts about her coachman and maid; she was sure they were spying on her. And, seeing her friend dumfounded and hopeless, she added very quickly:

'I will go—I will go wherever you please.'

---

CHAPTER V

When he returned that night to his modest lodgings in the Via Angelo Custode, Francesco Sangiorgio was in an almost feverish state. Donna Angelica's promise scourged his blood, his head was all a-buzz and confused. And immediately upon entering his parlour, a chilly sensation, and the bad smell forever pervading the place, made him shudder and feel nauseated. In order not to see the bare, wretched room, he neither lighted the lamp nor even struck a match. He threw himself dressed on his bed, and thought of the sort of house in which he could receive Donna Angelica.

His heated imagination, consumed with excitement and love, soared in visions. He conceived nothing definite, nothing exact. He saw before his open eyes a flight of warm, scented rooms, with heavy, triple curtains, with soft carpets deadening every sound, but did not know where they would be, these rooms. He could not determine in what part of Rome they could be found, now selecting the Janiculum, now the Piazza Navona, now the Via Sistina, now the Piazza di Spagna. And this uncertainty, this state of not knowing, racked him terribly; it was torture of the kind involved in a bad or unfinished dream, whose victim wants to walk and cannot stir, tries to scream and finds no voice. Where was the door to these rooms, where was the staircase, which way did the windows face?

He would see in his mind's eye a blaze of colours, the red of a silk curtain reflected on the wall, the tawny flash of a plush lounge, the metallic glitter from a Damascus blade under a ray of light, the intricate design of some old, yellow lace. But all this presented itself to him hazily, without his having a notion as to the where, the how, the when, or as to anything. Where would Donna Angelica sit when she came to this house, where would she rest her tired little feet, where would she put her beautiful arm, and assume her usual, ravishing attitude? He then fancied that in this house there would be neither chairs, sofas, stools, nor tables; he fancied an empty, vast, limitless space, where he and Donna Angelica would be lost to the world.

His imaginings made him writhe with anguish; a weight lay on his chest, his blood ran riot, his head was dizzy.

Stretched out upon his bed, half awake and half asleep, alternately in dismay and bliss over his dreams, he did not budge for fear that the whole might vanish, and Donna Angelica's promise as well; and at every new quarter of an hour spent in mental contortion his dream changed, was transmuted, was strangely reversed, became fearful or comical. At one time it seemed to him that he had been waiting for Donna Angelica ever since his memory had begun, and that she never, never came. The white curtains became yellow, and then gray; the hangings were discoloured and ruined by moths, falling to pieces, falling into dust; the furniture was all filthy, tumble-down from age; at the bottom of the flower-stand was a small heap of pestilent refuse that once had been flowers; the very walls exhaled dampness and decay, and seemed quite rotten. And he, Sangiorgio, in his everlasting wait, seemed to have become a tottering old man, more than a hundred years old, slow, infirm, with long, white beard and wan face. Donna Angelica never, never came, and Sangiorgio continued to wait, patient and lovelorn. Then a great voice thundered thrice through the house: 'Donna Angelica is dead! Donna Angelica is dead! Donna Angelica is dead!'

The first time, the furniture fell into bits; the second, the old man fell dead, face down and arms out; the third, the walls of the house crumbled, burying everything beneath them, making a tomb of the house Donna Angelica would not visit.

His dream was perpetually changing. He thought that on the day of the first meeting in this house, he through some curious cause had forgotten the hour of the appointment, and was fretting his brain to recall whether it was for two o'clock or three, but was not sure, could not remember.

Then he left Montecitorio at noon, so as to be in time, but in the corridor he met the old Prime Minister, who stopped him, and, while stroking his flowing white beard, talked to him about the Basilicata, salt, peasants, and things scarcely intelligible to Sangiorgio, so absent-minded did he seem.

He contrived to escape from him, but on the threshold of the portico he met the Honourable Giustini, whose hump had become enormous, and whose venomous grin gave him a pain in the chest, as if a leech had been sucking his blood. Giustini barred his way, crossing his crooked legs, talking to him of Rome, Rome that pretended to be lazily asleep, but that was really very wide awake; and he clenched his arm, hurting him as he did so. Eventually Sangiorgio tore himself abruptly away from Giustini's grasp, and ran across the Piazza Colonna, where a female voice hailed him from a closed carriage. He did not want to stop, yet felt he was being drawn to the carriage against his will. A pair of black, sparkling eyes gazed upon him with love and desire; there were the luscious, alluring lips that had kissed him, and were ready to kiss him again; there were the soft, caressing hands; there was the strong, sweet odour of violets; there was Donna Elena Fiammanti, who had liked him, and liked him still, and who, without moving her lips, said to him:

'Come with me! come, remember it all! Remember when we met on Christmas Day at the Janiculum; remember the night of the ball, and the moon, and the Piazza di Spagna; remember the roses I left at your house that day; remember the kiss I gave you in the theatre after the duel; remember all my kisses, all my love; come with me—with me is joy, with me is pleasure, with me you shall not weep, with me you shall not suffer. So come, tell me what afflicts you, and I will comfort you; I will not tell you of my sorrows, me you shall have no need to comfort.'

But he bent his head, stuffed up his ears, shut his eyes, in order not to hear that fascinating voice, in order not to see that face grow mournfully sad. He said a name to himself—'Angelica'—his talisman, and it seemed as if its echo struck Donna Elena in the heart, as if she threw herself back despairingly in the carriage, and ordered the coachman to drive quickly away.

Sangiorgio ran on and on. All the carriages he met were full, all the friends he met tried to stop him, a crowd hedging him in on all sides prevented his progress. Dogs got in his way. He ran on and on, panting, panting. Now he could not be in time; it was too late. Donna Angelica would be there already. She would have gone; she would not have waited. What a long way to go, what obstacles, what hindrances! At last he had reached the place. Red in the face, out of breath, hopeless, he now stopped short. In front of the door walked the Honourable Oldofredi, sardonic, dangerous, grinning. The very wound in his face that Sangiorgio had inflicted grinned. He was walking back and forth on guard, hideous, hateful, vengeful, implacable.

* * * * *

The house was No. 62, Piazza di Spagna. At the door an itinerant flower-girl had set down her basket of spring flowers: pale, odorous Parma violets, double roses, sweet-smelling jonquils. The staircase was dark, and three doors opened upon the landing. Sangiorgio's card was affixed to the central door by two pins. In a small anteroom Noci had put a bridal coffer of handsomely carved oak, on which lay a cushion of red and yellow silk, and by its side stood three or four stools and a table. A bronze lamp was suspended from the ceiling. It was always burning, and created an illusion of night in the rather gloomy anteroom, whose ugly ceiling and whose walls were covered by painted canvas, which concealed some grotesque pictures and a large map of France. The sitting-room had a large window overlooking the square. It was a spacious, cheerful, sunny room. Damask curtains of old rose and pale green, falling over a widow-shade of yellow lace, softened the garish light of day. The walls were stretched with satin of a light nut colour, which disappeared beneath Persian rugs and squares of antique brocades, artistically draped, and held in place by a shining metal shield, by a silver scimitar, or by fan-shaped tufts of peacock's feathers. A sandalwood rosary, one of the long necklaces of perfumed beads which Turkish women are always running through their fingers to scent their hands, and to kill heavily hanging time by a monotonous pastime—such a Turkish rosary, not for praying, but for pleasure of touch and mind, a comboloi hung upon one of the walls; from the other hung a great white veil with silver stars, the gear worn by Eastern women called feredje. But the strange, dominant feature was on the walls—a piece of antique, yellow brocade, something like an oriflamme, with a Latin cross, cut lengthwise and crosswise in black velvet, a cross that stood out strikingly amid all the quiet tints of hazelnut, dull brick, and pale pink which prevailed in the room. The place was extremely luxurious. There was not a single piece of bare wooden furniture, not a table or stool with sharp corners; everything was velvet, silk, and satin. In vases of opalescent glass were hyacinths, mauve lilac, white and blue; an orchid in a Japanese vase was languidly shedding its leaves. On an immense divan eiderdown cushions lay, heaped up in a corner, in fabrics of purple, scarlet, amaranth, light pink, in short every shade of red, from the faint blush in the heart of the white rose to the darkest wine colour; this might serve for a chair, a bed, or a throne. The two windows of the bedroom also fronted upon the Piazza di Spagna; it was a sort of second parlour, draped with dark blue velvet striped white and silver. There was no bed, but only a low divan, over which lay a blue and silver cover with a long, ornate 'A' worked in the middle. Overhead a tent, which was the colour of the nocturnal sky, and, like it, sprinkled with stars, threw down a discreet shadow. It formed a peculiar triangle, sustained by silver ropes and loops. A rosewood cupboard relieved this sombre tone, besides some of the small, dainty, coquettish furniture of the kind affected by the Pompadour.

In a tall Japanese vase, big enough for a man to hide in, a paradise plant spread its opulent, richly-veined leaves. There was not another plant, not another flower. The little dressing-room adjoining was hung with creamy cashmere, and on a table all enveloped in snowy muslin was displayed a set of toilet articles in oxidized silver, between two enormous full-blown white azaleas. The place has been furnished in four days, in obedience to Sangiorgio's desperate haste. At first he had comported himself rationally, going there occasionally to superintend matters, but soon he became too impatient. Everything seemed too ugly for her; nothing could be done quickly enough. He went away, determined to come back only when the house should be finished, sleeping or dozing or dreaming the while in his cold, foul-smelling quarters in the Via Angelo Custode, pending the preparation of the lovers' nest in the Piazza di Spagna.

He did not return until everything was ready, and then his emotions were at once joyous and sorrowful. What would she say to it? Was not the sitting-room too voluptuous for the fair, dignified creature, who never threw herself into an easy attitude in an armchair? Would not this Oriental savour be too sensual for the chaste mind of that gentlest of beings? Were not the hyacinths, those flowers without leaves, too carnal in their efflorescence? And those piled cushions, crimson and faint pink—did they not too directly invite to repose, the perfidious repose in which the soul surrenders?

The bedroom he thought handsome in its severity, but never would the pure one enter it. He was satisfied and agitated. He had wished the apartment to be fitted out as a retreat for lovers, and this was accomplished. The secrecy and seclusion of the spot, the floral and exotic perfumes, now upset his ideal—or, rather, gave rise to a new ideal, more vital, more human.

* * * * *

Here, in his apartments warmed by the bright sun, which blazed upon the Piazza di Spagna from the dark Propaganda Fide to the cheerful Albergo di Londra, Francesco Sangiorgio was sitting opposite the open grate, where a fire of dry wood was always crackling and flaming, waiting for Donna Angelica. As soon as the apartment was completed, he had begun to repeat his persuasions whenever he found himself alone with her for a moment, at her house, at the theatre, in the diplomatic gallery, going from one door to another, in a corridor, on the threshold of her home, in any place where he could say a word or give a beseeching look without being seen or heard. This matter of meeting in the Piazza di Spagna house had become his mania; he neither spoke to her of, nor asked her for, anything else. She, repenting of having made the concession, and plunged into scruples, still refused to come, shaking her head, distrustful of him and of love, and apprehensive of being seen in the streets. She never mentioned her fears, her suspicions, but persisted in declining, always possessed by the indifference of a chaste woman, cured of ardent impulses, beyond any inclination to sin against religion. He became irritated and indignant at her suspicion, embittered through her resistance, the violence of his temperament and desires clashing against Donna Angelica's mildness, shattering against her refusal. Profound exasperation at himself and love began to take root in him, and he felt the injustice of such treatment from the woman he loved. One evening, overcome with resentment because of Donna Angelica's ingratitude, trembling with anger, he said to her:

'Well—tell me—why are you afraid—of what—of whom? Have I not always been obedient to your wishes? Do you not understand, Angelica, that you are in no danger whatever with me? Your strength is in yourself—you have no weaknesses—you never falter!'

She raised her head, all blushing with pride and defiance.

'I will come,' she said, like a heroine sure of victory.

'When?'

'I do not know. One of these days. You know the hours at which I am free.'

Further particulars she would not give. She felt no obligation to do so, believed he lived there in the Piazza di Spagna, and that it cost him nothing to wait for her. She believed in his devotion; like all women, she counted only her own sacrifice, and could not estimate that of the other side.

And every day towards the end of a very beautiful April Sangiorgio spent several expectant hours in the little sitting-room of the Piazza di Spagna. He rose rather late in his wretched lodgings in the Via Angela Custode, and dressed leisurely while sipping a cup of atrocious coffee, brought in by the servant. He touched neither pen nor book in the morning, but left the reeking atmosphere of those rooms as soon as possible. From instinctive curiosity he went to Montecitorio for his letters, but set foot neither in the reading-rooms nor the lobbies. Some of his colleagues addressed him thus:

'What has become of you? We never see you nowadays. Why have you left off attending the sittings?'

'I have some work to do,' he would reply, passing a hand over his forehead.

Or someone would inquire:

'I suppose you have been to the Basilicata, Sangiorgio? Is your agricultural report nearly ready?'

'Yes, yes, I have been in the Basilicata,' he would answer, very much embarrassed and very red, adding vaguely: 'Yes, the report will soon be finished; it is a tremendous piece of work.'

He avoided being questioned, since he hated lies, and was not adept in the invention of them. He went away from Montecitorio, reading his letters without grasping their intent, uninterested in the requests of his constituents and of the officials in his district. Up to a month before he had been a model deputy, cool but courteous, answering all inquiries, frequently doing so on the day of receipt; not losing much time over unimportant people, wisely rendering services to influential constituents, and to everybody likely to be useful, satisfying one with a promise, or securing realization for another—in fact, offending no one. But now all this was distasteful to him; he could not endure the thought of it. His mind dwelt incessantly on the pretty little nest where his sweet lady would come to see him, and with a nervous gesture he would thrust his correspondence into his pockets, shrugging his shoulders, and would go straight to the Colonne, to breakfast there all alone, absorbed in his fancies, immersed in Buddhist-like meditations on love. He ate blindly, and when his conscience happened to prick him because of urgent letters to be answered, he would order paper, pens, and ink, and would write hurriedly, briefly, on a corner of his little table, leaving his beefsteak to get cold.

But after a few letters disgust and impatience would overtake him; he would pay the bill and depart quickly. Sometimes the letters he had written remained in his pockets several days; he had forgotten them, and they were no longer any use. By one o'clock he was always in the Piazza di Spagna, buying flowers from all the flower-girls, loading himself with roses, hyacinths, and violets, hastening so as not to miss Angelica, who might, perhaps, be at his very door while the key was in his pocket.

The quiet, luxurious, cheerful atmosphere of the apartment gave him a delightful sensation of contentment. Donna Angelica was certain to come; she had promised—yes, she was certain to come. And he would set himself to lighting the fire, squatting on the ground, like an eager husband much in love. He knew that he would be displeased if, when the wood was burning brightly, Donna Angelica did not express approval of the blaze which quickens the blood and warms the heart.

Then he would wander about the apartment, putting flowers in the vases, throwing away those that were faded in the little empty kitchen; and sometimes he placed a jar of hyacinths differently, bunched roses and violets together, separated them again, never satisfied, pursuing this lover's task with great assiduity. He would wander about the apartment, and the bedroom, with the low soft divan, would always cause him a nervous thrill. He would go back into the sitting-room, to the fire—the chaste, comfortable fire, the purifying fire, the symbol of a noble soul. There he would wait.

Fortunately, the contemplation of a fire is a great pleasure to thoughtful and intense souls, so that Francesco Sangiorgio was able to restrain, to rock, as it were, his impatience at Donna Angelica's absence.

Though spending five or six hours a day alone by the grate in the little room without venturing to go away, he learnt to follow the whole life of the fire, from the small spark that grows and spreads to the big roaring flame, from the vigorous and powerful blaze to the spark that shrinks, dims, dies. His eye, on those long spring afternoons, mild to suffocation, followed the life, the glow, the death of each ember; and while his whole soul cried out and longed for Donna Angelica, consuming away for very desire, the fire was burning, like himself, with the same heat, the same flaring up, the same languid smouldering, that by degrees perished. The fire was at its brightest between four and six, the time during which Donna Angelica was most likely to come; at that time, in the heart of the man as well as in the grate, there was a mighty furnace, a temperature high enough to melt anything, courage or metal. Any moment she might come; perhaps even now she was on the stairs, was trembling and hesitating on the landing. He closed his eyes at the very idea, at the fierce, violent shock it gave him. Every day between four and six his nervous system underwent a double strain of excitement, and during those two hours the flames from the logs would lick the walls of the fireplace.

Then came the twilight. Hope and desire declined within the bosom of the lover, who was sunk in lethargy; the fire declined in the grate, the light failed, the embers blackened, and the gray ashes of night descended upon the earth, upon love, upon the fire. At half-past seven each evening he would depart, in the chill of the evening and of the street, in the chill of his own disappointment. He would go away pale and stooping, his hands in his pockets and his head down on his chest, like a wretched victim to fever, whose system is pervaded with the disease, like a gambler who has lost his last game.

And, like the gambler who every day is bowed down under his chagrin, but who every night finds fresh strength to hope and play more energetically and daringly, so did the discouraged lover in the evening, when he saw Donna Angelica, renew his faith in love. He then saw her only among other people, and could scarcely get a word with her, but her eyes said to him, exhorting him to patience, to fortitude:

'Wait for me; wait for me still! I am coming!'

The next day, in spite of the voice of doubt in his soul, in spite of all past disappointments, he would once more hie to the little apartment in the Piazza di Spagna, and shut himself up there. It was folly to expect her before two o'clock, but, in his impatience, he came earlier every day, going at noon into the little sitting-room, where the bright April sun was shining, and leaving later than ever in the evening—at eight. At times, sitting by the waning fire, he would be overtaken by drowsiness, as fever patients often are; he would doze and dream, waking up with a start, thinking he heard a bell ring. But it was nothing; Donna Angelica did not come. And connected with this waiting was something vastly exasperating: before he was thus obliged to wait for Donna Angelica, silent and alone, before he had any notion of an apartment, he was at liberty to go out, upon the chance of finding her at a lecture, at a reception, at the Parliament, out walking—could even find an excuse to go to her house for a moment, could, failing anything better, talk about her for a minute with Don Silvio. But now it was different. While she went about, perhaps to the Villa Borghese, perhaps to a friend's for a visit, perhaps to a Parliamentary sitting; while she was shedding the light of her presence on women, fools, and callous people; while any silly fop could see her, make his bows to her, talk with her—he, who loved her, who wanted her, who lived for her alone, was condemned to inactivity, to impotence, alone, all alone between four walls, tormented by these two thoughts:

'Where is she? Will she come?'

At first, before he had any notion of an apartment, he still was one of the human fraternity. He went about among people, under the sway, it is true, of a single idea, but at least showing all evidence of life. His colleagues met him, spoke to him, discussed with him; he listened mechanically and answered like a musician who plays by ear; he pretended interest in his former passion. That was at any rate a semblance of living. But now, betwixt him and politics, betwixt him and life, a great chasm existed. He would appear at Montecitorio for a moment merely, early in the morning from his habit of going there for letters; after which the apartment in the Piazza di Spagna swallowed all thought and action, took entire possession of Sangiorgio's activity and attention. At night, when he set forth in quest of Donna Angelica, he would come back to life like a somnambulist: he knew nothing, had heard and seen nothing, had spoken with no one, had read no newspaper, had a childish air. Meanwhile such opinions as these began to gain currency regarding him:

'That Sangiorgio! He seemed such a formidable fellow! What a pity!'

'Just like all Southerners! A blaze of straw that gives neither light nor heat.'

'Sangiorgio has had his day.'

He felt this wall of ice building around him, this separation from everybody, this departure from public life. He was keenly conscious of the dissent between his spirit and politics; he realized that each day with his new, absorbing ideal removed him thousands of miles from his old ideals. All of this he plainly saw.

He was not blind—oh no! not blind, but waking, and wanting to sacrifice himself. He was not a victim uttering words of despair, not a rebel reviling a tyrant, but a happy, contented martyr, blissfully watching his best blood flow from his veins. And the more his love carried him away, the greater did his enthusiasm grow, the greater his sacrifice, the greater his wish for sacrifice. Thus a sort of sombre, painful sense of pleasure would overcome him when, on sunny mornings, he left the streets, so full of people and business and the movement of life, to shut himself up in a little room and wait. Like a fanatical worshipper of Buddha, he went up and down the whole scale of annihilation, even to the utter abstraction of suffering, even to a Nirvana that was all pain.

* * * * *

It was the first morning of the month of May—a fair, sunny, fragrant morning, on which the bells of the Trinita dei Monti were chiming merrily. Sangiorgio had just arrived at his sanctuary laden with roses, but his face was pale and thin; the moist freshness of the flowers, their healthy, handsome colour, contrasted with the bearer, who was mournful and sickly as an October evening laden with noxious vapours. He was arranging the roses with the childish look of pain that inspires compassion, the more so because sincerely and uncomplaining. A light touch of the bell gave him a nervous thrill, made him blush, sent tears to his eyes. The roses fell on the carpet.

'It is I,' whispered Angelica Vargas, as she walked in. She did not look about, but hastened into the parlour, sat down in an armchair, and repeated, 'It is I.'

He stood by her, gazing at her with his tearful eyes, not venturing a word, not even finding courage to thank her.

She, sweet lady, had kept her promise; she could not lie. With fragrant May, the poetic month of roses, she had come—the divine one. Surely she was the Madonna to whom roses are offered. Without saying a word, upon an abrupt impulse, he went through the house collecting all the roses, whether on the ground or in the vases, and very gently, without remark, poured them into her lap, until her dress, which was of a light gray material, was covered with them.

'I have delayed coming very long,' she murmured, bending her head under the stream of flowers, 'but I could not help it.'

And she made a vague gesture of female helplessness. With glance of eye and sign of hand he begged her to desist; her actions needed no justification in his sight. And so profound was the consolation of her presence in the house, so complete his heart's felicity, that he was loath to disturb it by any painful thoughts, any suggestion of reproach. The sweet lady, dressed in a delicate shade of gray, with an airy white feather in her hat, with a transparent, white veil over her eyes, which made her face look more youthful than ever, sat composedly in her chair, her knees covered with roses, one hand gloved in gray lying hidden among the roses in her lap, while the other ungloved hand hung out of her sleeve with open fingers, as though she had dropped something. He sat down beside her, gently raised her inert hand, carried it to his lips, breathed a kiss upon it. She appeared not to notice it.

'It is quite pretty here,' she tranquilly observed, after a lengthy pause, as if visiting a female friend in a new house. 'Yes, it is quite pretty.'

'I thought I had heard you say you liked the Piazza di Spagna,' he answered.

'It is the part of the town I like best. You have made a good choice. I have never been able to find an apartment here. Old Rome, where I live, is so very, very dismal; that is why I go out so much. Whenever I do, no matter what hurry I am in, I always pass through the Piazza di Spagna.'

'Come and stay in this room,' he said smilingly, as if in jest.

'I would come if I could,' she replied innocently, 'but I cannot. I must live down there, in the shade. How sunny it is here! And you have flowers for sale in the doorways; I saw some as I came in here. The houses seem to be full of them. I should think that all the homes in this square must be happy. So much sunlight, so much spring, so much loveliness! You are happy here, are you not, my friend?'

'Yes,' he said, with deep meaning.

'May God bless you,' she murmured, as though she were praying. Then she buried her face for several minutes in a rose.

'And then,' she resumed, 'by way of contrast to all the brightness, to the white palaces, and the fine art shops, how strange is that great, severe, gray edifice, with the inscription "Propaganda Fide." The spread of the faith! Do you not think those words have a grand and mysterious sound, that they must go to all the corners of the earth? I hope you are a believer, my friend?'

'If you believe, Angelica, I believe also.'

'It is so vulgar to be an atheist! Religion is so good and beautiful; it is worth more than most things the world cares for. Have you ever been in any of the churches in Rome?'

'I have looked into the basilicas from motives of artistic curiosity.'

'Oh yes, those are great empty churches that serve no purpose. You must see the little Roman chapels, that are meant to pray in. There is one up there, at the Trinita, where the young monks sing behind a railing on Sundays. What divine music that is! The monks are out of sight, and one would say they were souls chanting their sorrows and joys. Let us go and hear them together some day. Would you like to?'

'If you wish it, I will go.'

'I should like you to think as I do, my friend. I should like you to feel what I feel. Perhaps you can guess at it.'

'I am so fond of you—I shall guess,' he said, with the stifled voice in which he always spoke when alluding to his love.

'Sh! You promised to say nothing about that!' she murmured, blushing like a little girl.

'Sometimes it is too much for me. Let me tell you again, Angelica, you who are sweetness itself. I am so fond of you, so fond of you that it is killing me! I am all alone, I have no one in the whole world, I love no one else, can love no one else; I am very fond of you, Angelica.'

And, observing that he was flushed with emotion, she said nothing more, but very lightly passed her hand over his face, as though it had been the wing of a bird or a leaf stirred by the breeze. He stopped, liked a shamefaced boy, brightening up a little, put out of countenance a little, feeling his face refreshed by the caress.

She smiled with a tinge of playful malice before asking him the following question:

'Is it true that you were in love with Elena Fiammanti?'

'No; I never was.'

'Then she was in love with you?'

'I do not think she was.'

'You never lie, do you?'

'No; never.'

'I think she loved you, nevertheless. She seems to have a rather light, fickle nature, but no doubt she has a good, affectionate heart. I hardly ever see her; she prefers men's society to women's. Have you really never been fond of her?'

'I never have been fond of anyone but you, Angelica.'

'Let us not speak of love. You promised me. If I mention it again do not answer. Let me go on talking without interruption. I feel the need of thinking aloud in the presence of one who understands me, sympathizes with me, has some affection for me. Sympathy, that is all! You will give me sympathy, will you not, my friend?'

'Angelica, Angelica, do not talk like that!'

'Because, you see, I am like a child sometimes; I forget that I am a woman, a responsible person. I become timid again, and superstitious, and fearsome, full of juvenile extravagances, unaccountable caprices. Outwardly to society I seem calm—that is my duty; but at times, when I am upset, when I am in a melancholy mood which has no explanation, or when I am suddenly gay without reason, then I want someone to sympathize with me. Do you sympathize with me, my friend?'

And, as if praying to him, she joined her hands, turning a pair of beseeching eyes upon him. He bent for a moment over her gentle white forehead, and kissed her there so lightly that it seemed a mere breath, and with such tender kindness, with affection so pure, that she was deeply moved, and began to shed silent tears.

'Do not weep, Angelica,' he soon said in a changed voice; 'do not weep.'

'Yes, let me—let me! I want to; at home I never can. Now—now I will stop; you shall see—it will be over directly.'

He did not interrupt her, since it would have been like taking a comfort away from the poor soul. But the tears which flowed over her cheek caused him a deep pang; they were terribly painful and terribly seductive to him; they acted upon him with the irresistible voluptuousness of agony. While she was talking quietly and cheerfully, as though she were in her own drawing-room, or visiting a friend's, and not shut up surreptitiously in a house with a lover, where no disturbing spirit would ever come, he was able to control his masculine feelings enough not to ask anything of her, not to speak to her of love. But when, after telling him of her incurably broken heart, of her lost illusions, of the dreams of her youth, dead and gone for ever, when she wept and wept over their grave, when he knew her sobbing softly and steadily, like a suffering child—then it was all he could do to resist the temptation of clasping her in his arms, of holding her close to him for ever, to their last hour.

Sangiorgio bent his head, so as not to see the face furrowed by tears, the bosom swelling and fluttering like a bird's. But, worn out at last, she gradually ceased, retaining the woebegone look of one who has been weeping, and the aroma of tears. She silently examined the lace on her soaked handkerchief.

'Your pardon, my friend,' she finally said, as if she just then remembered he was there.

'Do not speak of it; am I not your friend?'

'Ah me, I fear I am a dull friend!' she said with a faint smile. 'I certainly shall not bring much joy into your life. It would be better to lose me than to keep me, I assure you.'

'I like you as you are; I like you because you are as you are!' he declared passionately.

She remained silent for an instant as her eyes rested on a ray of light which penetrated the yellow lace curtain, played upon the carpet, and lit up the heap of red cushions all ready for a tired lady. A sudden thought crossed her mind, and she rose abruptly.

'I must go.'

'No, no, no!' he pleaded in despair, as if such a thing was quite out of the question.

'I must go,' she repeated seriously.

'Why?' he asked in childish manner.

'Because——' she answered, smiling at his ingenuous question.

'Stay a little longer; you have only just come.'

'It is one o'clock. It is late. I must go!'

'A few minutes, a few minutes more,' he urged, in the boyishness of his love.

'I cannot possibly; I have already stayed too long.'

'What difference can a few more minutes make?'

'No difference, but what is the use? A minute more, or five minutes more—what can it matter to you?'

'Do not torture me, Angelica. Be kind; grant me another five minutes.'

'I will stay, but you are very exacting,' quoth she, shaking her head like a mother who is unwillingly surrendering a sweetmeat to her clamouring little boy.

And then they remained standing opposite each other at the door, she as though annoyed and wishing to be gone, he as though embarrassed and sorry for having kept her back. Of a sudden Sangiorgio's face exhibited an anxious doubt.

'And shall you really never come back?'

'I will come back.'

'Oh yes, you say so, but you will not come!' he exclaimed in deep agitation, and totally carried away by this idea. 'Why deceive me? You are going away, and I shall never see you here again. I have a presentiment of it; I feel it in me!'

'I shall come back—I shall come back,' she assured him, with that gentle, firm voice that had the power of assuring him. And to reassure him she allowed the freshness of a smile to dwell on him for a moment, the serenity of her glance.

This calmed and appeased him.

'Promise me, then, that you will come back. Will you promise?'

'I promise you.'

'For the sake of the thing or person interesting you most in the whole world?'

'For the sake of the thing or person interesting me most in the whole world, I promise you.'

'When will you come back?'

'That I cannot tell. My time is not my own. I will come back when I can.'

'You can come back soon if you want to, Angelica. Anyhow, can you not mention an hour or a day?'

'What for? Do you find waiting for me tiresome? Is this not your home?'

'Yes, but at least name a day——'

'Oh, then, you do not like waiting for me! You have more amusing things to do.'

'No, Angelica, nothing.'

'Well, then?'

'Well—if you only knew, Angelica, how sad I feel when I do not know the day or the hour that I am to see you again! This vague expectation is torture—it is a nightmare! You would be sorry for me, Angelica, if you knew how it makes my heart and my brain suffer. Even if you intend to delude me, or you cannot come, still, name a day.'

'To-day is Sunday,' she reflected. 'To-morrow I cannot come, nor the day after, nor Wednesday; all my time is taken up those days. Thursday—yes, you may count on seeing me on Thursday——'

'Not before?'

'How do I know? Possibly for a minute one of those three days. But I will come on Thursday for certain. Good-bye, my friend!'

'Oh, stay!' he cried, holding her back by the hand.

'How childish you are! Good-bye!' And she flitted down the stairs, as though she were making a fortunate escape.

Immediately he felt as if life were ebbing from him; he felt as if all his blood was flowing away out of a deadly wound. He did not look back into the room where they had been together, nor at the place where they had sat side by side. He took his hat and darted off to find Angelica, in the wild hope of finding her. The square, so full of sunlight in the middle of the day, dazzled him, and instinctively he made for the Via Condotti. But nowhere did he descry the pretty gray dress and the white veil. Halfway up the street he retraced his steps, and hastened in the direction of the Via Propaganda Fide—a name fresh in his memory—wandered through the Via Sant' Andrea delle Fratte, the Via Mercede, and the Via San Silvestro, like one befogged, like someone eagerly looking for a thing he is sure of having lost.

But the dear shape seemed to have melted into the sunshine, for, after searching all the streets in the neighbourhood of the Piazza di Spagna in hot haste, spurred by an invincible impulse, Sangiorgio had not succeeded in finding her. He then walked for another hour by the Via Babuino, the Via Due Macelli, and the Via Sistina, to the Villa Medici and the Pincio, prey to a nervous tension which prevented him from feeling fatigued, giving rein to the mad idea that Donna Angelica must have intended to take a walk at this time of the day. He arrived in the Piazza del Popolo, suddenly composed, with tired legs, with his brain all confused. It must be late, he thought, very late; he seemed to have spent a long, eventful day; he felt the moral and physical fatigue incident to the great days of a lifetime. He took out his watch. It was barely half-past one; the rest of the day was a blank to him. Mechanically and very, very slowly, in obedience to former habits, he wended his way down the Corso to the Chamber, with a disgusted expression, ignoring the handsome middle-class Roman women going home from Mass, recognising no one who bowed to him in the glad, bright beams of that May Sunday. He went to the Parliament, but did not know whether on a Sunday there would be a sitting. Nevertheless, he went to take refuge there, not knowing what to do with body or soul. The people he met all appeared new and foreign to him, and as he looked at them, surprised at so many strange faces, they, too, seemed to look at him in surprise and askance. At this hour the coming and going of deputies about Montecitorio was incessant; friends went up and down in couples, and also little groups of politicians, who had lunched together at the Colonne, the Parliamente, the Fagiano, or the Sorelle Venete. Sangiorgio acknowledged a bow now and then as if he was in a dream. He saw them debating, heard them arguing; passing close by them, he caught snatches of their discussions, but it all conveyed nothing to him. Luckily, there was a sitting that day.

He took his usual seat, and from the force of physical habit put the papers in front of him in order, while hearing the small but penetrating voice of Sangarzia read out the schedule of proceedings. What was it all about? That voice was bewildering to his mind. Those words he seemed to have heard before—but when? It cost him a stupendous effort to pull himself together. He was like a man who, after experiencing a growing nervous exhilaration for a certain period, afterwards yields to utter lassitude, his strength being totally exhausted.

He sat with his head between his hands, trying to grasp the sound and sense of all that was being said. But he was too weak. A torpor was creeping over him; he was afraid he might fall asleep! He went out upon the corridors to smoke a cigar. The Honourable di Carimate, the agreeable Lombard gentleman, chairman of an agrarian committee, accosted him:

'Well, Sangiorgio, what about that report?'

'The report? Yes, when was I to have given it to you?'

'Why, a week ago. We are very much behindhand. I tried to find you everywhere. Did you not receive my last two notes?'

'No, neither,' he answered, lying.

'And to think that yesterday we were attacked! I was obliged to answer, as chairman. Have you been ill?'

'Very ill.'

'You look it. I hope you will get better, Sangiorgio. Have you caught a fever by any chance?'

'I think so.'

'I hope you will get better. And when do you say we may be ready?'

'I can hardly tell. In a week, perhaps. I will let you know.'

He returned to the hall, after shaking off the painful sensation of the lie. The Honourable Bonora was still speaking. An obscure, tedious newcomer, who would make a speech on every question, he was now boring the house. The Speaker, from his chair, made a friendly little sign to Sangiorgio, who went down and shook hands with him.

'Ill?' asked the Romagnan of the honest brown eyes.

'Slightly.'

'Why do you not apply for leave of absence?'

'I shall. I want it.'

And he went back to his seat exhausted. A strong sense of irritation began to take root in him. It was five o'clock, and he seemed to have been in the Chamber for a century. San Demetrio, the Abruzzan deputy, and Scalia, the Sicilian, were talking in undertones about a duel between an editor and a deputy, and asked his opinion; he manifested obvious indifference.

All these voices, high or deep, at length sickened him. He was hot all over; he felt ill in that atmosphere; he was suffering there, could scarcely breathe. He left hurriedly, took a cab, and drove straight to the quarters in the Piazza di Spagna. There he threw himself, with outstretched arms, into a large chair Angelica had occupied, rested his face where that dear head had rested, and wept long and bitterly.

---

CHAPTER VI

Angelica only kept her appointments with Sangiorgio by exception. Sometimes in the evening, when handing him a cup of tea, she would hastily whisper to him:

'To-morrow, at two o'clock.'

'Are you sure to come?' he would ask, since he had been disappointed several times.

'Quite sure.'

Believing this promise, he lived upon it that night and the next morning. By two o'clock she would not have arrived. At first he would think she had been delayed, would take patience, and look out of the window for her. Then he would be seized with uncertainty, and finally, at dusk, in that sweet month of May, he would lose hope altogether, and give way to despondency. When he saw her again, in all her beauty and serenity and freshness, as frank as ever, and amiable towards everybody, he was invaded with mingled bitterness, tenderness, and regret. Never, never should she know the extent of his love and sufferings. She excused herself not at all, or else only vaguely, by some brief phrase interjected fugitively into an account she was giving someone else of the day's tiresome doings. It was always a concert, a lecture, a charity bazaar, some visits to a hospital, a public function, or else some other trivial or stupid affair, which had interfered. Thus Sangiorgio's despair increased, for he saw how little of that soul belonged to him. But the whole evening she would lavish on him the sweetness of her veiled glances, would hold him captive under the fascinating brightness of her smile, would ask him for a book, her fan, or her handkerchief in such dulcet tones, and, in fact, impressing him to such an extent as the type of beatific femininity, that by the end of the evening he would be conquered once more. In his weakness, he would mentally ask her pardon for having harboured resentment.

From time to time, however, she remembered the poor recluse who was waiting for her, shut up indoors in the ripe springtide, so delightful to enjoy in the streets of Rome and among the villas and on the flowery hills. She would arrive in the Piazza di Spagna unexpectedly, at an unforeseen hour, at ten in the morning or at seven in the evening, just as he was about to go away disconsolate. Once she came during one of the long May rain-storms and the first flashes of summer lightning. These unexpected visits always gave Sangiorgio a violent moral shock; he could not accustom himself to them, occurring as they did when he had lost hope of receiving any more, when he was plunged in the depths of disappointment, or into the half-besotted state peculiar to persons given to a single idea. Never did satiety come to him, since each new appearance of Donna Angelica was a special grace to him, a jewel from her spiritual treasure-house. And when she came in the first consoling moment the wearing, terrible pain of hopeless waiting was miraculously healed; the afflicted, sick, suffering man was resurrected like Lazarus from the tomb.

In the presence of the beloved reality he forgot everything he had endured in his visions of her, and when she was with him he could do nothing but worship her, kneel before her humbly, kiss her hands, thanking her for remembering him. And Donna Angelica maintained the place to which Sangiorgio's love had exalted her, which she was able to keep by force of her temperament and character, which was a high, solitary niche, unattainable, unassailable, a tabernacle of virtue and purity, whence she might deign to incline her eyes to him who loved her, might smile at him, stretch out a hand to him, allow the hem of her garment to be kissed, and this without any of her condescensions in the least dulling her aureole, without her divinity ever becoming humanized or femininized. Whenever she came to see him, it was an act of grace; her hands showered roses; she brought felicity with her. Her part was to do nothing but exist, appear, smile and vanish. And this she did.

Sangiorgio's individuality was losing itself more and more. Never did Angelica concern herself about his thoughts, feelings, or tortures during her absence; never did she question him about his work, his ambitions, his aims; she seemed to have no curiosity to really know him. She called him Sangiorgio, simply because she thought his Christian name, Francesco, too commonplace and ugly. And he felt this commonplaceness and this ugliness, and regretted both, but did not dare to ask her to call him by his first name.

Sitting beside him, looking at the large, black velvet cross on the yellow, brocaded cloth—a combination of vivid and sombre passional colours—she vouchsafed to talk to him at great length, observing with what ecstasy he listened. Angelica yielded to the everlasting need that women have of communicating their thoughts, on all matters, great or small, to the want of a vent that drives so many of them to the steps of the confessional, that gives rise to so many sham friendships with other women, that also makes them seek a confidant in a man, without a care for the effect of their confidences.

How much she had to say—she, who was condemned to perpetual silence—of Don Silvio's political pursuits, his age, his sardonic disposition! How much she had to say—she, whose husband's position forbade her to enter upon friendship with any woman in her social circle! And here she had found a confidant, the best of confidants, ever happy to listen to her, ever ready to agree with her, ever prone to sympathize with her, ever prone to admire her, hearing from his tongue the echo in epigram of the plain meaning of her speech and thought. He interpreted them best, in the way that women like, being a man who wanted to know everything, whose curiosity was insatiable, who understood everything, was indulgent towards all small faults, magnified and glorified the smallest virtues, turned a word into a poem, a sentence into a sentiment, and a kindness into a heroic deed—this man in love.

Sitting beside him, in the quiet of the room, the flower-scented room, among the soft-hued materials and the deep rich folds suggestive of intimacy, surrounded by all the queerly contrasting exotic articles, her eyes fixed on a glittering gold spot in some fabric, she would talk of herself, of the state of her heart, of the inexpressible sorrows no one should ever know of, but which he alone knew, of her small spiritual enjoyments, brief pleasures only confessed to one's self or one's closest friend.

Angelica's disillusionment after marriage had not been abrupt, but gradual, continuous, increasing day by day, through a number of small griefs, until indifference and isolation had come. Her legitimate hopes of married happiness, of beautiful dreams, of a pure, tranquil love, and of faith in a loyal soul, had wretchedly gone shipwreck, and shattered against Don Silvio's great, burning, selfish passion—politics. It had not been the catastrophe of an instant, the huge, prostrating catastrophe, from which, however, recovery is possible through the natural workings of a strong soul; it was the daily drop, drop that hollows out, that ploughs furrows, that at last vanquishes even the hardness and coldness of stones.

Donna Angelica had much to say in telling the tale of her moral widowhood, and she musically varied her infinite lamentations in every key of sadness. She made no open accusations, not she; not a harsh or reviling word crossed her lips. But everything was mournful, innocent complaint, was the story of how she had been gradually and cruelly crushed, narrated with a delicate choice of words, but with an irremediable sense of woe.

Sangiorgio listened to it, and seeing her so wrapt up in her tale, so affected by what had been the slow stamping out of her heart, that he had no courage even to interrupt her, nor did he ever venture to tell her how he would have worshipped her, had fate blessed him with the supreme favour of giving her to him as his wife.

With avidity he received, from the adored lips, the minutest details of those small, daily tribulations, shuddering at each one of them, feeling what she had felt. He saturated himself in her story, which by degrees became his own, in which his personality ever more surely dissolved; when she, agitated by her own recital, and observing the paleness and perturbation of her listener, gave vent to tears or forcibly restrained them, he, by reflection, experienced the same emotion.

In one of her sentiments he went further than she did.

Donna Angelica did not hate Don Silvio, not knowing how to hate, but he was shut out of her heart for evermore; she could not love him because he had neglected to love her; could not respect him because politics force a man into too much bargaining and baseness. But she did not hate him—oh no! he was merely indifferent to her. And she uttered her little assertions of indifference with such frigid precision, with such icy simplicity, that Sangiorgio shivered with the thought that these killing words might some day apply to him. But he went further than Angelica. He was a man, and he hated Don Silvio with a true lover's hatred. He hated him cordially, in every way, morally and materially, as an enemy and a wicked man, as a fortunate rival and a despicable creature; he hated him to the point of wishing him defeated, disgraced, defamed, dishonoured, dead. He had robbed him of Donna Angelica, barrened her soul, rendered her incapable of further illusions, made her unhappy and suspicious of happiness; he had never loved her and had destroyed her faculty of loving; he—yes, he—still had Angelica in his power. And Sangiorgio also hated Don Silvio—that husband—with the fury, the jealousy, and the injustice of a lover who loves truly.

But this was not all that Donna Angelica related in her visits to the Piazza di Spagna. With the juvenile frankness of women who never do wrong, with the unobtrusive but dangerous sincerity which so closely resembles decoying and coquetry, she indulged in the circumstantial description of the feelings, habits, rules, tastes, which are the foundation of woman's life.

Sangiorgio now knew in detail the whole of Donna Angelica's daily life. At any time, closing his eyes, he could imagine what she was doing, so often had she repeated her favourite pursuits to him.

Although she went to bed late, she got up early in the morning, from an early Northern habit she had never been able to shake off. No one was allowed in her room, not even her maid. Angelica insisted that no one should intrude into the sacred nook of her nocturnal thoughts and dreams and slumbers. Did he, Sangiorgio, not think a bedroom was a sanctuary, to be free from profane intrusion? Yes, he thought so, she was quite right, he would reply, greatly agitated, with a fire burning his entrails. Donna Angelica only permitted her maid to do her hair and dress her when she went to balls; she detested the officious hands of servants about her body, their vulgar babble, the contact of their fingers with her hair, all of which shocked and disgusted her. Long ago, as a young girl, finding the length of her tresses annoying when she combed her hair, she had had it cut short, and had begun to wear the dark coiled headdress of an adult. One day, when she spoke of this in whispers, as in a dream, Sangiorgio humbly asked her to let her hair down, as he had never seen how long it was. She simply said no; that she would never have time to arrange it again; that it took an hour. He repeated the request in vain. She promised to do it some other day, when she would have more time with him.

After her toilet, Donna Angelica spent a couple of hours in her little sitting-room next to her bedroom, reading, writing, dreaming, always alone.

She answered the notes of her friends up there, and the people who sent her applications, and those who wanted recommendations. She wrote very fast, always using white paper, without crest, motto, or monogram; the like of these, to which other women were devoted, she considered cheap, vulgar.

One day he asked her to write something on paper, a line merely, since he had never had a written word from her; and she would perhaps have done it, but Sangiorgio searched the apartment in vain, unable to lay his hands on either an inkstand, a pen, or a sheet of paper. In this house, intended for love, there were naturally lacking the things intended for study, for business, for everything that was not love.

She remarked, with a smile, that he evidently never wrote. No, he never wrote, he said—he only loved; and Angelica, still smiling, signed to him to stop. She would not listen to any of this, would not come back if he continued.

And the delightful, fascinating confidences would go on.

At half-past eleven she usually met Don Silvio at lunch. She was always hungry in the morning, like all young and healthy people. She would like to be chatting and laughing with someone as young and lively as herself at that cheerful hour of the day, but Don Silvio was at that hour always bursting with anger or the morning's annoyances, was never hungry, because the disease of politics had ruined his liver and stomach; and all through the meal he read newspapers and letters, and wrote at the table, just as he did in his drawing-room at the Braschi mansion, in the Chamber, and everywhere. Ah! she preferred to the company of that lean, old, pertinacious devourer of newspapers, letters, and telegrams, who let his cutlet get cold on his plate, who forgot to eat his fruit, in his daily fit of bile—to this she preferred being alone, with the sun casting a long ray on the table, with the music of a piano near by, with the buzz of the noonday flies when the weather was warm. And, seized with one of the strange caprices that pure women have, she proposed to Sangiorgio to go into the country quite early some morning, to one of the little inns with terraces arboured by creeping vines, and to have a meal together, as truant schoolboys might.

'But why do you torture me? why do you tell me this?' he asked, gently reproachful.

'Do I torture you?'

'You would never go.'

'Yes, I shall—yes, I shall,' she murmured uncertainly, still amused at her juvenile idea.

After lunch Donna Angelica began her duties as a Minister's wife, as a woman with public obligations. She also went shopping then. She liked plain dresses, and black was her favourite colour. And Sangiorgio—yes, she knew he, too, cared most for black; he had seen her in black the first time, at the station, the day he arrived in Rome. Then came all the feminine features of politics—calls to be made and returned, patronesses' committees, meetings of charitable associations, benefit concerts, diplomatic receptions, opening ceremonies, lectures, prize distributions—all those long, tedious affairs, for no object, for no sensible reason, a brilliant gloss over cardboard, all for the honour of His Excellency, nothing for its own sake, nothing spiritual. She loathed all that. Ah! how happy she might have been as the wife of a quiet, thoughtful man, who was not eaten with the fever of politics, who regarded political power as an ignominious farce, who estimated correctly what it was to be Minister—namely, to be the accused instead of the judge, to sit on the prisoner's bench.

'Your wife, Sangiorgio,' she added.

'Oh, Angelica!' he said, with a peculiar intonation.

But she did not understand. She had revealed her whole life to him, had told him everything. Sangiorgio knew her, but she did not know Sangiorgio.

* * * * *

A change occurred in their relations. Angelica had become accustomed to these visits, and came often, showing the easiest manner, as if she expected to meet friends, exhibiting neither a trace of sentiment nor the slightest diffidence. Sangiorgio sometimes scanned her face in doubt: it was serene, unclouded by fear or shame.

When she arrived she sat down as if she were in any other house, with not a quiver in her voice, not a tremor of her hand; nothing to suggest a woman doing a surreptitious thing, nothing to indicate consciousness of deceit. There now seemed to be no difficulty about coming; it was such a natural, simple thing. She would often come between two calls; she would leave the Chamber, and, on her way to the Russian Ambassadress, would see him for a moment—just a moment—before going on to the Embassy. She would come between two errands; after leaving her dressmaker's, who lived in the Piazza di Spagna, to go to Janetti's to buy some article, she would come and ask Sangiorgio's advice about a garment, or about a little Renaissance shrine.

One day she cruelly said, as she entered:

'I happened to be passing by, and as I thought you might possibly be at home, I came up.'

Another time, when he was looking out into the street through the window, which he did not dare to open for fear of being recognised, and was almost suffocated with the heat of the room, he saw her walking in the square with her rhythmical step, glancing at the shops and the people. He gave a start, and wanted to call out to her to make her come up, but he lacked the courage, and his voice failed him. She went on and on without looking back. At a certain moment something seemed to come into her mind. She turned round, threw up a glance at that first-story window, saw that eager pale face behind it, smiled, went back again and up to his apartment, as she might have called on a friend she had seen on a balcony. How cruelly she did this! And these meetings with a man who was in love with her, in a private place, in a room accessible to no one, aroused no sense of guilt or betrayal in her. In fact, the thing had become a habit. She shook hands with him as one does with friends in the street; she let him button her glove as if they were at a ball; she looked him as straight in the face, treated him as she did in her own drawing-room; she spoke of trivial or serious matters according to inclination; she gave him any letters to read that might be in her pocket; she consulted him on family affairs; she had adopted a familiar friendly tone, never speaking or thinking of love, being ingenuously and aggressively blunt and open.

Not so Sangiorgio. This continued intimacy, these secret confidences, these sequestered chats, in a warm room, with the lady of his heart, the hand he was allowed to kiss, the arm that rested so softly on his, the wavy locks on her forehead, which she let him fondle—all this physical femininity excited his blood and his senses, stirring up manhood and youth in him anew.

He was a man after all, and when that beloved face leaned very close to his in conversation, when he felt the odour of that hair going to his brain, when that supple form fell back in an armchair, shaken by a sob or in a burst of merry laughter, when that fair brow was bent in thought, at such moments he was on the verge of clasping Angelica in his arms, tenderly, passionately, in a lingering grasp.

The divine image had become too kind, too familiar, and too friendly for him not to feel her sex, with all her charms, all her seductions; they were together too much, alone and safe, for him always to remain a calm, religious worshipper; his love was too great for him not to aim, ultimately, at the entire possession of this woman.

In vain did he try to drive away temptation by recalling the sweet, pure beginning, when love floated on the wings of the ideal and the abstract; however hard it might once have been to relinquish her, now it was impossible to banish Angelica from his blood and his fibres.

It was all in vain. The absolute, Buddhistic five months' concentration had brought with it the concentration of his mind upon a single desire. With his simple, sober, robust nature, he in vain tried to escape from this phase of contemplation, for he was unable to wish for anything else. He went through daily struggles not to let Angelica read the truth in his longing eyes, not to let her understand the trembling of his longing lips, to prevent his longing arms from snatching her in their embrace. He was a man after all, and he fought because of his promise, fought with inner desperation, with now victory, now defeat imminent. The sweet lady smiled at him, put her face near his, spoke to him in whispers, all unwitting, cruel and innocent. He choked, he shut his eyes, as if it were all over with him. He had promised, promised! But she—why did she not understand? She was a woman, surely! Then why did she play with this peril? He had promised, but he was a man; endure the struggle he could not. How was it that Donna Angelica did not understand? Had she never understood? How long was this martyrdom to last? No, the torture of it was surpassing his strength. To have her there with him, beautiful, young, beloved—to be alone with her in that silent place—yet no, he could not break his promise which he had given: he must spare her that cup, he must give her up, she must come no more!

One day in June, while explaining a new way of doing her hair, she remembered her promise to take it down and let him see it.

'No, no,' he murmured.

'Why?' she asked innocently.

'I could not bear it.'

'Not bear it?'

He did not answer. She took off her hat, laughing, snatched out three hairpins and a tortoiseshell comb, and shook out the dark tresses over her shoulders, still laughing like a child in fun.

'How lovely! how lovely!' he exclaimed in a stifled voice, seizing some of her locks and kissing them.

'May I go into your room to make myself tidy?' she asked, jumping to her feet, pink and fresh under this hood of hair.

She had never been in there, nor had ever evinced any curiosity to go. And she did not now wait for Sangiorgio's sanction, but went in without further ado, quite at home, confiding, unsuspecting. First, she was taken aback at the blue striped with silver, at once so sober and so sensual. She mechanically passed the yellow comb into her hair, without looking into the Pompadour mirror. Sangiorgio, standing by her, said nothing. Then her eyes fell for a moment on the blue velvet coverlet. She saw the capital 'A' embroidered on it, saw that piece of audacity, and uttered a faint cry of pain. She looked into Sangiorgio's eyes, and the truth was plain to her. Speechless, she knotted her hair on her neck, left the room, put on her hat, took her gloves and went away, without looking back.

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CHAPTER VII

Sangiorgio was idling under the porch at Montecitorio, while inside the ushers were nimbly extinguishing the gas in the library, reading and writing rooms, and offices. He was gazing at the starry summer sky and the square, being unable to make up his mind to go home. A tall, lean man, appearing from the Via Orfanelli, came up to him, cigar in mouth, with shoulders slightly bent.

'Good-evening, Sangiorgio,' he said. 'Are you at liberty?'

'Good-evening, Don Silvio. I am.'

'I have something to say to you.'

'Shall we go to your office, then?'

'No, no, not there.'

'To your house?'

'No, not to my house, either. I prefer to go to yours, Sangiorgio.' dryly answered the Minister, raising his head.

'As you please,' answered the deputy in the same tone, having understood what was coming. 'Come.'

They went across the Piazza Colonna in silence, smoking their cigars, looking at their shadows against the ground in the moonlit night. At the corner of the Via Cacciabove Sangiorgio made motion to turn off.

'That way?' asked Vargas doubtfully.

'Certainly.'

'Do you not live at 62, Piazza di Spagna, Sangiorgio?'

'I admit it,' rejoined Sangiorgio frigidly.

They continued along the Corso, both maintaining silence, meeting people who were coming out of the summer theatres, the Quirino, the Corea, the Alhambra, and who, recognising the Minister's tall figure in spite of the darkness, pointed him out to one another, and turned round to look at him, taking Sangiorgio for a secretary or clerk. The two walked very slowly. At the Via Condotti no more people were in sight; there was no one in the Piazza di Spagna. The front-door of No. 62 was closed, but Sangiorgio had a key, though he had never been there at night. He lit a match on the dark staircase, Don Silvio following, still smoking. In the anteroom the oil lamp, which was always burning, threw sombre shadows on the carved, wooden bridal coffer, on the high-backed chairs. In the sitting-room, where no lights had ever been used, Sangiorgio turned about in embarrassment, match in hand, at a loss how to obtain a light. At last he found a slender, bronze, Pompeian candlestick, with three pink candles, which he lit. He sat down opposite Don Silvio, who had already taken a seat. The Minister had thrown his cigar away on the landing, and left his hat in the anteroom; his head was lowered on his chest, and his eyeglass hanging down on his coat. Don Silvio was in one of his reflective moods.

'I am waiting, Don Silvio,' said Sangiorgio, with difficulty restraining himself from speaking impatiently.

'I was thinking, Sangiorgio,' quietly began the Minister, 'what a very strong desire you must have to kill me.'

'Very strong.'

'To-day, no doubt, it is irresistible.'

'Irresistible.'

'You are wrong, Sangiorgio,' Don Silvio went on, very gently. 'Why should you wish to kill me? I am old, quite old; what you do not do, death will soon do in its natural course.'

'Don Silvio!' cried the other, suddenly prostrated.

'It is true; I am seventy-two years old, but I have lived the lives of three men. I am, in reality, more exhausted and much weaker than anyone knows of. Some day I shall collapse in a single moment. You might be my son, Sangiorgio. You would surely not kill your father for the sake of the inheritance.'

'Don Silvio, Don Silvio, do not say such things!'

'Yes, let me speak. We will not fight about this, however strong my right to do so, and however great your desire. Besides, it would be ridiculous. I, so near the grave, assuming the heat and passion of youth; you, so young, confessing you could not wait. We must not make ourselves ridiculous. I understand such affairs, when they are a question of love and youth, as being tragical, not comical. Better dishonour than a farce, Sangiorgio.'

'True, quite true.'

'And then there is Angelica,' added her aged husband, pronouncing the name with infinite tenderness.

A prolonged silence occurred in the little temple where the absent divinity still invisibly reigned.

'Angelica is good; she must not suffer. When she threw herself into my arms to-day, trembling with terror, beseeching me to save her—do not be jealous, Sangiorgio; she is a daughter to me—although I knew her secret, I let her speak, because her tears, her sobs, her despair, were the proof of her virtue: they showed her conscience rebelling against evil.'

'You knew her whole secret?'

'Yes, from the very first. She did not exactly remember whether she came here for the first time on the second or the third of May; but I knew very well it was on a Sunday, the first of May. She confessed to having been here about fifteen times, but I knew better—that she had come eighteen times. I am Minister of Home Affairs. But I do not reproach her, and I am not reproaching you; you are right to love each other.'

Sangiorgio humbly raised his head to look the grief-smitten old husband in the eyes.

'Of course,' he resumed, 'Angelica being handsome and young and clever, she required some young person like herself, entirely devoted to her, who would appreciate all her good, lovely qualities, who would live the life of the spirit and the heart together with her. Instead, she has a withered, disbelieving, ruined old man, who has an old and greedy passion to feed—ambition, the exacting, absorbing, furious passion of men over forty.

'It is natural that Angelica should prefer you to me. As for you, who know how to love, and still want to, who have no ambition, who do not yet know that fever of the soul which never can be stilled, who have a heart full of trust and an imagination full of enthusiasm, you prefer the sweet intoxication of love to everything else. Who could possibly find fault with you? It is you who are the wiser; we are the fools. We deserve to be tricked and deceived; we are striving for a vulgar sham, you for a divine reality! I cannot blame you.'

Sangiorgio listened, with his face buried in his hands, without proffering a word.

'Further than that,' Don Silvio went on, as if soliloquizing, 'that great thing called man, that power, that force, that combination of forces, is governed by a certain law which imposes a restriction upon his achievements. Do this, and nothing else, says this law, if you do not want to be feeble and insufficient in both. One single, strong, intense, profound passion you may entertain; one single, high, distant, unattainable ideal you may cherish; and your soul must be completely devoted to this sole passion, from which nothing must make you swerve, and your soul must be wholly bent upon that one ideal if you want to reach it. Love, art, politics, science, these great human activities, these highest forms of passion, and the ideal, all go their own separate roads; and so stupendous are they that the miserable mind of a man can scarcely get his grasp on one of them. A man cannot be a scientist and an artist, nor a politician and a lover, without failing in both the things he wants to do. We must take our choice; the great human interests of mind and heart are selfish, and demand heavy sacrifices.'

'What is Donna Angelica's wish?' asked Sangiorgio briefly, rousing himself from the long spell of meditation in which he had been immersed.

'That you leave Rome, Sangiorgio,' answered Don Silvio.

'I shall leave. For how long?'

'As long as possible.'

'I shall hand in my resignation. May I see her once more? I have not the shadow of an evil thought in making this request now.'

'She wishes not to see you.'

'Very well. May I at least write to her?'

'She begs that you will spare her. You will understand her reserve.'

'I understand. Now, tell me, Don Silvio, in this bitterest hour of my life, tell me before God, is it you who are compelling her to do all this, or is she doing it of her own free will?'

'I swear to you, my son,' said the old man gently, 'that it is all by her own free will, without any compulsion from me. You may see her if you like; I shall offer no opposition. But it will be better for you not to see her,' he added significantly.

'Is she suffering?'

'She has suffered.'

'What does she say about me?'

'She counts upon your love.'

'Very well. Tell her I am going away never to return. Good-bye, Don Silvio.'

'Good-bye, Sangiorgio.'

And they took leave of one another at the street door, under the sky of night.

'Another word, Don Silvio. You knew I loved Donna Angelica, and that she came to see me. Had you no fears?'

'I know Donna Angelica,' answered Don Silvio, with an accent of profound conviction, and went away.

Francesco Sangiorgio understood. Like Don Silvio, he now also saw what Donna Angelica was—the woman who knew not how to love.

* * * * *

He stole to the Speaker's rooms while the House was sitting, since he did not wish to be seen. From there he wrote a note, in which he asked to resign for reasons of health—a curt note, without any other particulars whatever. Upon handing the letter to the usher, his nerves underwent a violent shock; he seemed to be suffocated by a rush of blood. After seeing the man disappear through the door, he fell back into the yellow satin armchair, aged and weak, as if he were coming out of a ten years' sickness. He waited and waited, not daring to stir, not daring to go into the Chamber, whence that day he was voluntarily banishing himself. He was afraid to show himself, like a criminal; was afraid to give way to his feelings; was afraid to throw himself on the ground and weep over everything that was dying in him that day.

The usher came back with a note from the Speaker. The Chamber, as was customary, granted him, on the request of the Honourable Melillo, a three months' leave of absence. Did they not understand, then, that he wanted to go? Was the agony to begin over again? He was obliged to write the Speaker another note; positively, he was ill, and could not act as deputy any more. Then he walked up and down in the Speaker's sitting-room, like a caged lion; and each time he was near the bedroom he became seized with a sense of envy.

In there, on a bed to which he had been carried after taking a sudden fit during a speech he was making in the Chamber, a young and bold athlete of finance had breathed his last. He had known the supreme blessing of being able to die like a soldier on the battlefield, and Sangiorgio envied him his death. The usher came back. The House accepted the resignation, in view of the urgency of the case, the Speaker conveying besides a short message of regret, with wishes for his recovery. That was all, and it was the end of all. Sangiorgio mechanically felt for his medal, his pride, his amulet, and between his fingers it seemed eroded, thinned, as if it had been through fire. And slowly he went thence, resisting his strong desire to look once more at the lobbies, the corridors, the waiting-rooms, the library, the refreshment-rooms, the offices. But he went away without seeing them, since he was afraid of meeting too many deputies, to be obliged to give too many explanations, and shake too many hands; and he knew—yes, he knew that before anyone who should happen to be the first to bid him good-bye he would burst into tears, without shame, like a boy whose father has shut the door of his house against him. Better had he leave as though he cared not, like an unfaithful servant, who goes unthanked and without being bidden farewell; who wants to say no thanks, and offers no farewells.

Suddenly, in the Montecitorio Square, he felt a great void within and all about him. He seemed to have nothing more to do, to have nowhere else to go to, to be excluded from seeing anyone; all things, people, and events became discoloured all at once. He wanted neither to walk, eat, talk, nor think; it all seemed useless—all. Instinctively he made for the Via Angelo Custode, to his old lodgings, where so much dust had accumulated in the summer, and where the disgusting smell of bugs was mixed with other horrible smells that came from the courtyard. There he threw himself on the bed, face downwards, buried in the cushions, hands lifeless, in mortal inanition. He had made no attempt to see Donna Angelica again; what use would it have been? Would there have been any change in her, or in his love, if he had seen her?

It was all useless, all of it. He owed a large sum to an upholsterer, and another to a bank, the natural penalty of every honest but forbidden love. But what did it matter? He would pay, perhaps, when he was able, at some uncertain date; otherwise, if it meant ruin—well, so much the worse. Nothing could hurt him now; everything was useless, everything. He did not even want to see the apartment in the Piazza di Spagna again, all fragrant still, and warm with Angelica's late presence; he did not want to kiss the place where she had sat. These memories must be buried in the past; the evidence of the past must perish. Nor did he desire to take another walk through Rome, the city of his choice, the city of his dreams, which he was to quit in two hours.

He was fit for nothing more, and all was useless—all.

Now that all was over, better remain out of sight on that wretched bed in the furnished lodgings, with the filth and the vile smells, better see and hear nothing.

Surely this was a sleep-walker, this man who was going to and fro in the waiting-room at the station, after taking a second-class ticket for an unheard-of little place in the Basilicata, since he had not enough money to buy a first-class ticket. He must be walking in his sleep, this man, who saw none of the passengers, but stumbled up against them, while waiting for the departure of the Naples train; who paid no attention either to his traps, or to the itinerant newsvendor offering him papers, or to the summer breeze that blew the gas about. This was a sleep-walker, surely, who was looking for a seat as he vacantly followed the voice of the guard.

Ah, the long dream! With the first puffs of the departing train a severe shock at his heart awakens the pale sleep-walker. He moves to the window of the coach and sees Rome, black, towering, stupendous, on the seven hills flooded with light. And he draws back, and falls upon the seat as one dead, for in very truth Rome has conquered him.

THE END

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BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD

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