Eleanor was the first to break the silence.

'You have had a long pilgrimage to find us,' she said quietly. 'Yet perhaps Torre Amiata might have occurred to you. It was you that praised it—that proposed to find quarters at the convent.'

He stared at her in amazement.

'Eleanor—in God's name!' he broke out violently, 'tell me what this all means! What has been the meaning of this mad—this extraordinary behaviour?'

She tottered a little and leant against the wall of the house.

'Find me a chair, please, before we begin to talk. And—is that your fly? Send it away—to wait under the trees. It can take me up the hill, when we have finished.'

He controlled himself with difficulty and went round the house.

She pressed her hands upon her eyes to shut out the memory of his face.

'She has refused him!' she said to herself; 'and—what is more—she has made him believe it!'

Very soon his step was heard returning. The woman he had left in the shade listened for it, as though in all this landscape of rushing river and murmuring wood it the one audible, significant sound. But when he came back to her again, he saw nothing but a composed, expectant Eleanor; dressed, in these wilds, with a dainty care which would have done honour to London or Paris, with a bright colour in her cheeks, and the quiver of a smile on her lips. Ill! He thought he had seldom seen her look so well. Had she not always been of a thistle-down lightness? 'Exaggeration!—absurdity!' he said to himself fiercely, carrying his mind back to certain sayings in a girl's voice that were still ringing in his ears.

He, however, was in no mood to smile. Eleanor had thrown herself sideways on the chair he had brought her; her arms resting on the back of it, her delicate hands hanging down. It was a graceful and characteristic attitude, and it seemed to him affectation—a piece of her fine-ladyism.

She instantly perceived that he was in a state of such profound and passionate excitement that it was difficult for him to speak.

So she began, with a calmness which exasperated him:

'You asked me, Edward, to explain our escapade?'

He raised his burning eyes.

'What can you explain?—how can you explain?' he said roughly. 'Are you going to tell me why my cousin and comrade hates me and plots against me?—why she has inflicted this slight and outrage upon me—why, finally, she has poisoned against me the heart of the woman I love?'

He saw her shrink. Did a cruel and secret instinct in him rejoice? He was mad with rage and misery, and he was incapable of concealing it.

She knew it. As he dropped his head again in an angry stare at the grass between them, she was conscious of a sudden childish instinct to put out her hand and stroke the black curls and the great broad shoulders. He was not for her; but, in the old days, who had known so well as she how to soothe, manage, control him?

'I can't tell you those things—certainly,' she said, after a pause. 'I can't describe what doesn't exist.'

And to herself she cried: 'Oh! I shall lie—lie—lie—like a fiend, if I must!'

'What doesn't exist'?' he repeated scornfully. 'Will you listen to my version of what has happened—the barest, unadorned tale? I was your host and Miss Foster's. I had begun to show the attraction that Miss Foster had for me, to offer her the most trifling, the most ordinary attention. From the moment I was first conscious of my own feeling, I knew that you were against me—that you were influencing—Lucy'—the name dropped from his lips in a mingled anguish and adoration—'against me. And just as I was beginning to understand my own heart—to look forward to two or three last precious weeks in which to make, if I could, a better impression upon her, after my abominable rudeness at the beginning—you interfered—you, my best friend! Without a word our party is broken up; my chance is snatched from me; Miss Foster is spirited away. You and she disappear, and you leave me to bear my affront—the outrage done me—as best I may. You alarm, you distress all your friends. Your father takes things calmly, I admit. But even he has been anxious. Aunt Pattie has been miserable. As for me—'

He rose, and began to pace up and down before her; struggling with his own wrath.

'And at last'—he resumed, pausing in front of her—'after wandering up and down Italy, I find you—in this remote place—by the merest chance. Father Benecke said not a word. But what part he has played in it I don't yet understand. In another half-hour I should have been off; and again you would have made the veriest fool of me that over walked this earth. Why, Eleanor?—why? What have I done to you?'

He stood before her—a superb, commanding presence. In his emotion all unshapeliness of limb or movement seemed to have disappeared. Transfigured by the unconsciousness of passion, he was all energy and all grace.

'Eleanor!—explain! Has our old friendship deserved this? Why have you done this thing to me?—And, my God!'—he began to pace up and down again, his hands in his pockets—'how well—how effectually you have gone to work! You have had—Lucy—in your hands for six weeks. It is plain enough what has been going on. This morning—on that hill—suddenly,'—he raised his hand to his brow, as though the surprise, the ecstacy of the moment returned upon him—'there among the trees—was her face! What I said I shall never remember. But when a man feels as I do he has no need to take thought what he shall say. And she? Impatience, coldness, aversion!—not a word permitted of my long pilgrimage—not a syllable of explanation for this slight, this unbearable slight that had been put upon me as her host, her guardian, for the time being! You and she fly me as though I were no longer fit to be your companion. Even the servants talked. Aunt Pattie and I had to set ourselves at once to devise the most elaborate falsehoods, or Heaven knows where the talk would have spread. How had I deserved such a humiliation?—Yet, when I meet Miss Foster again, she behaves as though she owed me not a word of excuse. All her talk of you and your health! I must go away at once—because it would startle and disturb you to see me. She had already found out by chance that I was here—she had begged Father Benecke to use his influence with me not to insist on seeing you—not to come to the convent. It was the most amazing, the most inexplicable thing! What in the name of fortune does it mean? Are we all mad? Is the world and everyone on it rushing together to Bedlam?'

Still she did not speak. Was it that his mere voice, the familiar torrent of words, was delightful to her?—that she cared very little what he said, so long as he was there, living, breathing, pleading before her?—that, like Sidney, she could have cried to him: 'Say on, and all well said, still say the same'?

But he meant to be answered. He came close to her.

'We have been comrades, Eleanor—fellow-workers—friends. You have come to know me as perhaps no other woman has known me. I have shown you a thousand faults. You know all my weaknesses. You have a right to despise me as an unstable, egotistical, selfish fool; who must needs waste other people's good time and good brains for his own futile purposes. You have a right to think me ungrateful for the kindest help that ever man got. You have a right as Miss Foster's friend—and perhaps, guessing as you do at some of my past history,—to expect of me probation and guarantees. You have a right to warn her how she gives away anything so precious as herself. But you have not a right to inflict on me such suffering—such agony of mind—as you have imposed on me the last six weeks! I deny it, Eleanor—I deny it altogether! The punishment, the test goes beyond—far beyond—your right and my offences!'

He calmed—he curbed himself.

'The reckoning has come, Eleanor. I ask you to pay it.'

She drew a long breath.

'But I can't go at that pace. You must give me time.'

He turned away in a miserable impatience.

She closed her eyes and thought a little, 'Now'—she said to herself—'now is the time for lying. It must be done. Quick! no scruples!'

And aloud:

'You understand,' she said slowly, 'that Miss Foster and I had become much attached to each other?'

'I understand.'

'That she had felt great sympathy for me in the failure of the book, and was inclined—well, you have proof of it!—to pity me, of course a great deal too much, for being a weakling. She is the most tender—the most loving creature that exists.'

'How does that explain why you should have fled from me like the plague?' he said doggedly.

'No—no—but—Anyway, you see Lucy was likely to do anything she could to please me. That's plain, isn't it?—so far?'

Her head dropped a little to one side, interrogatively.

He made no reply. He still stood in front of her, his eyes bent upon her, his hands in his pockets.

'Meanwhile'—the colour rushed over her face—'I had been, most innocently, an eavesdropper.'

'Ah!' he said, with a movement, 'that night? I imagined it.'

'You were not as cautious as you might have been—considering all the people about—and I heard.'

He waited, all ear. But she ceased to speak. She bent a little farther over the back of the chair, as though she were making a mental enumeration of the leaves of a tiny myrtle bush that grew near his heel.

'I thought that bit of truth would have stiffened the lies,' she thought to herself; 'but somehow—they don't work.'

'Well: then, you see'—she threw back her head again and looked at him—'I had to consider. As you say, I knew you better than most people. It was all remarkably rapid—you will hardly deny that? For a fortnight you took no notice of Lucy Foster. Then the attraction began—and suddenly—Well, we needn't go into that any more; but with your character it was plain that you would push matters on—that you would give her no time—that you would speak, coÛte qua coÛte—that you would fling caution and delay to the winds—and that all in a moment Lucy Foster would find herself confronted by a great decision that she was not at all prepared to make. It was not fair that she should even be asked to make it. I had become her friend, specially. You will see there was a responsibility. Delay for both of you—wasn't that to be desired? And no use whatever to go and leave you the address!—you'll admit that?' she said hurriedly, with the accent of a child trying to entrap the judgment of an angry elder who was bringing it to book.

He stood there lost in wrath, bewilderment, mystification. Was there ever a more lame, more ridiculous tale?

Then he turned quickly upon her, searching her face for some clue. A sudden perception—a perception of horror—swept upon him. Eleanor's first flush was gone; in its place was the pallor of effort and excitement. What a ghost, what a spectre she had become! Manisty looked at her aghast,—at her unsteady yet defiant eyes, at the uncontrollable trembling of the mouth she did her best to keep at its hard task of smiling.

In a flash, he understood. A wave of red invaded the man's face and neck. He saw himself back in the winter days, working, talking, thinking; always with Eleanor; Eleanor his tool, his stimulus; her delicate mind and heart the block on which he sharpened his own powers and perceptions. He recalled his constant impatience of the barriers that hamper cold and cautious people. He must have intimacy, feeling, and the moods that border on and play with passion. Only so could his own gift of phrase, his own artistic divinations develop to a fine subtlety and clearness, like flowers in a kind air.

An experience,—for him. And for her? He remembered how, in a leisurely and lordly way, he had once thought it possible he might some day reward his cousin; at the end of things, when all other adventures were done.

Then came that tragi-comedy of the book; his disillusion with it; his impatient sense that the winter's work upon it was somehow bound up in Eleanor's mind with a claim on him that had begun to fret and tease; and those rebuffs, tacit or spoken, which his egotism had not shrunk from inflicting on her sweetness.

How could he have helped inflicting them? Lucy had come!—to stir in him the deepest waters of the soul. Besides, he had never taken Eleanor seriously. On the one hand he had thought of her as intellect, and therefore hardly woman; on the other he had conceived her as too gentle, too sweet, too sensitive to push anything to extremes. No doubt the flight of the two friends and Eleanor's letter had been a rude awakening. He had then understood that he had offended Eleanor, offended her both as a friend, and as a clever woman. She had noticed the dawn of his love for Lucy Foster, and had determined that he should still recognise her power and influence upon his life.

This was part of his explanation. As to the rest, it was inevitable that both his vanity and passion should speak soft things. A girl does not take such a wild step, or acquiesce in it—till she has felt a man's power. Self-assertion on Eleanor's part—a sweet alarm on Lucy's—these had been his keys to the matter, so far. They had brought him anger, but also hope; the most delicious, the most confident hope.

Now remorse shot through him, fierce and stinging—remorse and terror! Then on their heels followed an angry denial of responsibility, mingled with alarm and revolt. Was he to be robbed of Lucy because Eleanor had misread him? No doubt she had imprinted what she pleased on Lucy's mind. Was he indeed undone?—for good and all?

Then shame, pity, rushed upon him headlong. He dared not look at the face beside him with its record of pain. He tried to put out of his mind what it meant. Of course he must accept her lead. He was only too eager to accept it; to play the game as she pleased. She was mistress! That he realised.

He took up the camp-stool on which he had been sitting when she arrived and placed himself beside her.

'Well—that explains something'—he said more gently. 'I can't complain that I don't seem to you or anyone a miracle of discretion; I can't wonder—perhaps—that you should wish to protect Miss Foster, if—if you thought she needed protecting. But I must think—I can't help thinking, that you set about it with very unnecessary violence. And for yourself too—what madness! Eleanor! what have you been doing to yourself?'

He looked at her reproachfully with that sudden and intimate penetration which was one of his chief spells with women. Eleanor shrank.

'Oh! I am ill,' she said hastily; 'too ill in fact to make a fuss about. It would only be a waste of time.'

'Of course you have found this place too rough for you. Have you any comforts at all in that ruin? Eleanor, what a rash,—what a wild thing to do!'

He came closer to her, and Eleanor trembled under the strong expostulating tenderness of his face and voice. It was so like him—to be always somehow in the right! Would he succeed, now as always, in doing with her exactly as he would? And was it not this, this first and foremost that she had fled from?

'No'—she said,—'no. I have been as well here as I should have been anywhere else. Don't let us talk of it.'

'But I must talk of it. You have hurt yourself—and Heaven knows you have hurt me—desperately. Eleanor—when I came back from that function the day you left the Villa, I came back with the intention of telling you everything. I knew you were Miss Foster's friend. I thought you were mine too. In spite of all my stupidity about the book, Eleanor, you would have listened to me?—you would have advised me?'

'When did you begin to think of Lucy?'

Her thin fingers, crossed over her brow, as she rested her arm on the back of the chair, hid from him the eagerness, the passion, of her curiosity.

But he scented danger. He prepared himself to walk warily.

'It was after Nemi—quite suddenly. I can't explain it. How can one ever explain those things?'

'What makes you want to marry her? What possible congruity is there between her and you?'

He laughed uneasily.

'What's the good of asking those things? One's feeling itself is the answer.'

'But I'm the spectator—the friend.'—The word came out slowly, with a strange emphasis. 'I want to know what Lucy's chances are.'

'Chances of what?'

'Chances of happiness.'

'Good God!'—he said, with an impatient groan.—'You talk as though she were going to give herself any opportunity to find out.'

'Well, let us talk so, for argument. You're not exactly a novice, you know, in these things. How is one to be sure that you're not playing with Lucy—as you played with the book—till you can go back to the play you really like best?'

'What do you mean?' he cried, starting with indignation—'the play of politics?'

'Politics—ambition—what you will. Suppose Lucy finds herself taken up and thrown down—like the book?—when the interest's done?'

She uncovered her eyes, and looked at him steadily, coldly. It was an
Eleanor he did not know.

He sprang up in his anger and discomfort, and began to pace again in front of her.

'Oh well—if you think as badly of me as that'—he said fiercely,—'I don't see what good can come of this conversation.'

There was a pause. At the end of it, Eleanor said in another voice:

'Did you ever give her any indication of what you felt—before to-day?'

'I came near—in the Borghese gardens,' he said reluctantly. 'If she had held out the tip of her little finger—But she didn't. And I should have been a fool. It was too soon—too hasty. Anyway, she would not give me the smallest opening. And afterwards—' He paused. His mind passed to his night-wandering in the garden, to the strange breaking of the terra-cotta. Furtively his gaze examined Eleanor's face. But what he saw of it told him nothing, and again his instinct warned him to let sleeping dogs lie. 'Afterwards I thought things over, naturally. And I determined, that night, as I have already said, to come to you and take counsel with you. I saw you were out of charity with me. And, goodness knows, there was not much to be said for me! But at any rate I thought that we, who had been such old friends, had better understand each other; that you'd help me if I asked you. You'd never yet refused, anyway.'

His voice changed. She said nothing for a little, and her hands still made a penthouse for her face.

At last she threw him a question.

'Just now—what happened?'

'Good Heavens, as if I knew!' he said, with a cry of distress. 'I tried to tell her how I had gone up and down Italy, seeking for her, hungering for any shred of news of you. And she?—she treated me like a troublesome intruder, like a dog that follows you unasked and has to be beaten back with your stick!'

Eleanor smiled a little. His heart and his vanity had been stabbed alike.
Certainly he had something to complain of.

She dropped her hands, and drew herself erect.

'Well, yes,' she said in a meditative voice, 'we must think—we must see.'

As she sat there, rapt in a sudden intensity of reflection, the fatal transformation in her was still more plainly visible; Manisty could hardly keep his eyes from her. Was it his fault? His poor, kind Eleanor! He felt the ghastly tribute of it, felt it with impatience, and repulsion. Must a man always measure his words and actions by a foot-rule—lest a woman take him too seriously? He repented; and in the same breath told himself that his penalty was more than his due.

At last Eleanor spoke.

'I must return a moment to what we said before. Lucy Foster's ways, habits, antecedents are wholly different from yours. Suppose there were a chance for you. You would take her to London—expect her to play her part there—in your world. Suppose she failed. How would you get on?'

'Eleanor—really!—am I a "three-tailed bashaw"?'

'No. But you are absorbing—despotic—fastidious. You might break that girl's heart in a thousand ways—before you knew you'd done it. You don't give; you take.'

'And you—hit hard!' he said, under his breath, resuming his walk.

She sat white and motionless, her eyes sparkling. Presently he stood still before her, his features working with emotion.

'If I am incapable of love—and unworthy of hers,' he said in a stifled voice,—'if that's your verdict—if that's what you tell her—I'd better go. I know your power—don't dispute your right to form a judgment—I'll go. The carriage is there. Good-bye.'

She lifted her face to his with a quick gesture.

'She loves you!'—she said, simply.

Manisty fell back, with a cry.

There was a silence. Eleanor's being was flooded with the strangest, most ecstatic sense of deliverance. She had been her own executioner; and this was not death—but life!

She rose. And speaking in her natural voice, with her old smile, she said—'I must go back to her—she will have missed me. Now then—what shall we do next?'

He walked beside her bewildered.

'You have taken my breath away—lifted me from Hell to Purgatory anyway,' he said, at last, trying for composure. 'I have no plans for myself—no particular hope—you didn't see and hear her just now! But I leave it all in your hands. What else can I do?'

'No,' she said calmly. 'There is nothing else for you to do.'

He felt a tremor of revolt, so quick and strange was her assumption of power over both his destiny and Lucy's. But he suppressed it; made no reply.

They turned the corner of the house. 'Your carriage can take me up the hill,' said Eleanor. 'You must ask Father Benecke's hospitality a little longer; and you shall hear from me to-night.'

They walked towards the carriage, which was waiting a hundred yards away. On the way Manisty suddenly said, plunging back into some of the perplexities which had assailed him before Eleanor's appearance:

'What on earth does Father Benecke know about it all? Why did he never mention that you were here; and then ask me to pay him a visit? Why did he send me up the hill this morning? I had forgotten all about the convent. He made me go.'

Eleanor started; coloured; and pondered a moment.

'We pledged him to secrecy as to his letters. But all priests are Jesuits, aren't they?—even the good ones. I suppose he thought we had quarrelled, and he would force us for our good to make it up. He is very kind—and—rather romantic.'

Manisty said no more. Here, too, he divined mysteries that were best avoided.

They stood beside the carriage. The coachman was on the ground remedying something wrong with the harness.

Suddenly Manisty put out his hand and seized his companion's.

'Eleanor!'—he said imploringly—'Eleanor!'

His lips could not form a word more. But his eyes spoke for him. They breathed compunction, entreaty; they hinted what neither could ever say; they asked pardon for offences that could never be put into words.

Eleanor did not shrink. Her look met his in the first truly intimate gaze that they had ever exchanged; hers infinitely sad, full of a dignity recovered, and never to be lost again, the gaze, indeed, of a soul that was already withdrawing itself gently, imperceptibly from the things of earth and sense; his agitated and passionate. It seemed to him that he saw the clear brown of those beautiful eyes just cloud with tears. Then they dropped, and the moment was over, the curtain fallen, for ever.

They sighed, and moved apart. The coachman climbed upon the box.

'To-night!'—she said, smiling—waving her hand—'Till to-night.'

'Avanti!' cried the coachman, and the horses began to toil sleepily up the hill.

* * * * *

'Sapphira was nothing to me!' thought Eleanor as she threw herself back in the old shabby landau with a weariness of body that made little impression however on the tension of her mind.

Absently she looked out at the trees above and around her; at the innumerable turns of the road. So the great meeting was over! Manisty's reproaches had come and gone! With his full knowledge—at his humble demand—she held his fate in her hands.

Again that extraordinary sense of happiness and lightness! She shrank from it in a kind of terror.

Once, as the horses turned corner after corner, the sentence of a meditative Frenchman crossed her mind; words which said that the only satisfaction for man lies in being dans l'ordre; in unity, that is, with the great world-machine in which he finds himself; fighting with it, not against it.

Her mind played about this thought; then returned to Manisty and Lucy.

A new and humbled Manisty!—shaken with a supreme longing and fear which seemed to have driven out for the moment all the other elements in his character—those baser, vainer, weaker elements that she knew so well. The change in him was a measure of the smallness of her own past influence upon him; of the infinitude of her own self-deception. Her sharp intelligence drew the inference at once, and bade her pride accept it.

They had reached the last stretch of hill before the convent. Where was
Lucy? She looked out eagerly.

The girl stood at the edge of the road, waiting. As Eleanor bent forward with a nervous 'Dear, I am not tired—wasn't it lovely to find this carriage?' Lucy made no reply. Her face was stern; her eyes red. She helped Eleanor to alight without a word.

But when they had reached Eleanor's cool and shaded room, and Eleanor was lying on her bed physically at rest, Lucy stood beside her with a quivering face.

'Did you tell him to go at once? Of course you have seen him?'

'Yes, I have seen him. Father Benecke gave me notice.'

'Father Benecke!' said the girl with a tightening of the lip.

There was a pause; then Eleanor said:

'Dear, get that low chair and sit beside me.'

'You oughtn't to speak a word,' said Lucy impetuously; 'you ought to rest there for hours. Why we should be disturbed in this unwarrantable, this unpardonable way, I can't imagine.'

She looked taller than Eleanor had ever seen her; and more queenly. Her whole frame seemed to be stiff with indignation and will.

'Come!' said Eleanor, holding out her hand.

Unwillingly Lucy obeyed.

Eleanor turned towards her. Their faces were close together; the ghastly pallor of the one beside the stormy, troubled beauty of the other.

'Darling, listen to me. For two months I have been like a person in a delirium—under suggestion, as the hypnotists say. I have not been myself. It has been a possession. And this morning—before I saw Edward at all—I felt the demon—go! And the result is very simple. Put your ear down to me.'

Lucy bent.

'The one thing in the world that I desire now—before I die—(Ah! dear, don't start!—you know!)—the only, only thing—is that you and Edward should be happy—and forgive me.'

Her voice was lost in a sob. Lucy kissed her quickly, passionately. Then she rose.

'I shall never marry Mr. Manisty, Eleanor, if that is what you mean. It is well to make that clear at once.'

'And why?' Eleanor caught her—kept her prisoner.

'Why?—why?' said Lucy impatiently—'because I have no desire to marry him—because—I would sooner cut off my right hand than marry him.'

Eleanor held her fast, looked at her with a brilliant eye—accusing, significant.

'A fortnight ago you were on the loggia—alone. I saw you from my room. Lucy!—I saw you kiss the terra-cotta he gave you. Do you mean to tell me that meant nothing—nothing—from you, of all people? Oh! you dear, dear child!—I knew it from the beginning—I knew it—but I was mad.'

Lucy had grown very white, but she stood rigid.

'I can't be responsible for what you thought, or—for anything—but what I do. And I will never marry Mr. Manisty.'

Eleanor still held her.

'Dear—you remember that night when Alice attacked you? I came into the library, unknown to you both. You were still in the chair—you heard nothing. He stooped over you. I heard what he said. I saw his face. Lucy! there are terrible risks—not to you—but to him—in driving a temperament like his to despair. You know how he lives by feeling, by imagination—how much of the artist, of the poet, there is in him. If he is happy—if there is someone to understand, and strengthen him, he will do great things. If not he will waste his life. And that would be so bitter, bitter to see!'

Eleanor leant her face on Lucy's hands, and the girl felt her tears. She shook from head to foot, but she did not yield.

'I can't—I can't'—she said in a low, resolute voice. 'Don't ask me. I never can.'

'And you told him so?'

'I don't know what I told him—except that he mustn't trouble you—that we wanted him to go—to go directly.'

'And he—what did he say to you?'

'That doesn't matter in the least,' cried Lucy. 'I have given him no right to say what he does. Did I encourage him to spend these weeks in looking for us? Never!'

'He didn't want encouraging,' said Eleanor. 'He is in love—perhaps for the first time in his life. If you are to give him no hope—it will go hard with him.'

Lucy's face only darkened.

'How can you say such things to me?' she said passionately. 'How can you?'

Eleanor sighed. 'I have not much right to say them, I know,' she said presently, in a low voice. 'I have poisoned the sound of them to your ears.'

Lucy was silent. She began to walk up and down the room, with her hands behind her.

'I will never, never forgive Father Benecke,' she said presently, in a low, determined voice.

'What do you think he had to do with it?'

'I know,' said Lucy. 'He brought Mr. Manisty here. He sent him up the hill this morning to see me. It was the most intolerable interference and presumption. Only a priest could have done it.'

'Oh! you bigot!—you Puritan! Come here, little wild-cat. Let me say something.'

Lucy came reluctantly, and Eleanor held her.

'Doesn't it enter into your philosophy—tell me—that one soul should be able to do anything for another?'

'I don't believe in the professional, anyway,' said Lucy stiffly—'nor in the professional claims.'

'My dear, it is a training like any other.'

'Did you—did you confide in him?' said the girl after a moment, with a visible effort.

Eleanor made no reply. She lay with her face hidden. When Lucy bent down to her she said with a sudden sob:

'Don't you understand? I have been near two griefs since I came here—his and the Contessa's. And mine didn't stand the comparison.'

'Father Benecke had no right to take matters into his own hands,' said Lucy stubbornly.

'I think he was afraid—I should die in my sins,' said Eleanor wildly. 'He is an apostle—he took the license of one.'

Lucy frowned, but did not speak.

'Lucy! what makes you so hard—so strange?'

'I am not hard. But I don't want to see Mr. Manisty again. I want to take you safely back to England, and then to go home—home to Uncle Ben—to my own people.'

Her voice showed the profoundest and most painful emotion. Eleanor felt a movement of despair. What could he have said or done to set this tender nature so on edge? If it had not been for that vision on the loggia, she would have thought that the girl's heart was in truth untouched, and that Manisty would sue in vain. But how was it possible to think it?

She lost herself in doubts and conjectures, while Lucy still moved up and down.

Presently Cecco brought up their meal, and Eleanor must needs eat and drink to soothe Lucy's anxiety. The girl watched her every movement, and Eleanor dared neither be tired nor dainty, lest for every mouthful she refused Manisty's chance should be the less.

After dinner she once more laid a detaining hand on her companion.

'Dear, I can't send him away, you know—at once—to please you.'

'Do you want him to stay?' said Lucy, holding herself aloof.

'After all, he is my kinsman. There are many things to discuss—much to hear.'

'Very well. It won't be necessary for me to take part.'

'Not unless you like. But, Lucy, it would make me very unhappy—if you were unkind to him. You have made him suffer, my dear; he is not the meekest of men. Be content.'

'I will be quite polite,' said the girl, turning away her head. 'You will be able to travel—won't you—very soon?'

Eleanor assented vaguely, and the conversation dropped.

In the afternoon Marie took a note to the cottage by the river.

'Ask Father Benecke to let you stay a few days. Things look bad. What did you say? If you attacked me, it has done you harm.'

* * * * *

Meanwhile Lucy, who felt herself exiled from the woods, the roads, the village, by one threatening presence, shut herself up for a while in her own room, in youth's most tragic mood, calling on the pangs of thought to strengthen still more her resolve and clear her mind.

She forced her fingers to an intermittent task of needlework, but there were long pauses when her hands lay idle on her lap, when her head drooped against the back of her chair, and all her life centred in her fast beating heart, driven and strained by the torment of recollection.

That moment when she had stepped out upon the road from the shelter of the wood—the thrill of it even in memory made her pale and cold. His look—his cry—the sudden radiance of the face, which, as she had first caught sight of it, bent in a brooding frown over the dusty road, had seemed to her the very image of discontent.

'Miss Foster!—Lucy!'

The word had escaped him, in his first rush of joy, his spring towards her.
And she had felt herself tottering, in a sudden blindness.

What could she remember? The breathless contradiction of his questions—the eager grasp of her hand—the words and phrases that were the words and phrases of love—dictated, justified only by love—then her first mention of Eleanor—the short stammering sentences, which as she spoke them sounded to her own ear so inconclusive, unintelligible, insulting—and his growing astonishment, the darkening features, the tightening lips, and finally his step backward, the haughty bracing of the whole man.

'Why does my cousin refuse to see me? What possible reason can you or she assign?'

And then her despairing search for the right word, that would not come! He must please, please, go away—because Mrs. Burgoyne was ill—because the doctors were anxious—because there must be no excitement. She was acting as nurse, but it was only to be for a short time longer. In a week or two, no doubt Mrs. Burgoyne would go to England, and she would return to America with the Porters. But for the present, quiet was still absolutely necessary.

Then—silence!—and afterwards a few sarcastic interrogations, quick, practical, hard to answer—the mounting menace of that thunderbrow, extravagant, and magnificent,—the trembling of her own limbs. And at last that sharp sentence, like lightning from the cloud, as to 'whims and follies' that no sane man could hope to unravel, which had suddenly nerved her to be angry.

'Oh! I was odious—odious!'—she thought to herself, hiding her face in her hands.

His answering indignation seemed to clatter through her room.

'And you really expect me to do your bidding calmly,—to play this ridiculous part?—to leave my cousin and you in these wilds—at this time of year—she in the state of health that you describe—to face this heat, and the journey home, without comforts, without assistance? It is a great responsibility, Miss Foster, that you take, with me, and with her! I refuse to yield it to you, till I have given you at least a little further time for consideration. I shall stay here a few hours longer. If you change your mind, send to me—I am with Father Benecke. If not—good-bye! But I warn you that I will be no party to further mystification. It is undesirable for us all. I shall write at once to General Delafield-Muir, and to my aunt. I think it will be also my duty to communicate with your friends in London or in Boston.'

'Mr. Manisty!—let me beg of you to leave my personal affairs alone!'

She felt again the proud flush upon her cheek, the shock of their two wills, the mingled anguish and relief as she saw him turn upon his heel, and go.

Ah! how unready, how gauche she had shown herself! From the beginning instead of conciliating she had provoked him. But how to make a plausible story out of their adventure at all? There was the deciding, the fatal difficulty! Her face burnt anew as she tried to think his thoughts, to imagine all that he might or must guess; as she remembered the glow of swift instinctive triumph with which he had recognised her, and realised from it some of the ideas that must have been his travelling companions all these weeks.

No matter: let him think what he pleased! She sat there in the gathering dark; at one moment, feeling herself caught in the grip of a moral necessity that no rebellion could undo; and the next, childishly catching to her heart the echoes and images of that miserable half-hour.

No wonder he had been angry!

'Lucy!'

Her name was sweetened to her ear for ever. He looked way-worn and tired; yet so eager, so spiritually alert. Never had that glitter and magic he carried about with him been more potent, more compelling.

Alack! what woman ever yet refused to love a man because he loved himself? It depends entirely on how she estimates the force of his temptation. And it would almost seem as though nature, for her own secret reasons, had thrown a special charm round the egotist of all types, for the loving and the true. Is it that she is thinking of the race—must needs balance in it the forces of death and life? What matters the separate joy or pain!

Yes. Lucy would have given herself to Manisty, not blind to risks, expecting thorns!—if it had been possible.

But it was not possible. She rose from her seat, and sternly dismissed her thoughts. She was no conscious thief, no willing traitor. Not even Eleanor should persuade her. Eleanor was dying because she, Lucy, had stolen from her the affections of her inconstant lover. Was there any getting over that? None! The girl shrank in horror from the very notion of such a base and plundering happiness.