IT was Genoa.

The end of all was at hand.

Rosina recollected the careless, callous manner with which in earlier, happier days she had spoken of this fated spot.

“Are you going home by the Southern Route?”

“Yes, we sail from Genoa;” or, “Do you leave at Naples?” “Oh, no, it’s Monte Carlo this time, so we shall get off at Genoa.”

Genoa!

Once she had thought its blue mountain masses most sublimely beautiful, now anything with hollows and shadows reminded her of those two misery-circled eyes, and she was led to wonder afresh if he, or she, would ever recover.

It is always astonishing how the port from which we sail partakes of our sailing sentiments. It’s a “jolly good place” or a “dull old hole,” just according to who is on the deck or who is on the dock. Handkerchiefs flutter gayly in the stolid face of Hoboken every day of the year, and many beside Marie Stuart have wept themselves out of sight of sunny France. It isn’t the place that counts when the anchor goes down or up, it’s the Who and the When; and in view of what has filled all the foregoing pages I trust that the reader will sympathize with Rosina and pardon my slang if I state that Genoa appeared to her upon this occasion very much more rocky than ever before.

Their arrival had not been auspicious, to begin with. The cab on its narrow way hotel-ward had collided energetically with another cab and had a wheel taken off. Jack was on the high side, and Rosina was only too anxious to have anything happen to her; but Ottillie, who had narrowly escaped being pitched out on her head, was quite perturbed, and feared that the accident was a bad omen for the voyage.

The following morning Rosina saw her cousin leave for the inevitable visit to Fratelli’s, and when he was safely out of the way she put on a walking-suit, veiled herself thickly, and, taking a carriage, went all alone to that grand eastern sweep of boulevard whose panorama of sea and city is so beyond the language of any pen to portray. At the summit she dismissed the carriage, and rested there alone, leaning against the iron balustrade, her eyes turned afar, her bosom riven by emotions as limitless as the horizon that lay before her. A sailing-vessel was spreading its wings for an Egyptian flight; in the port to her right the great white ocean liner was loading her cargo; overhead the gulls whirled, shrieking. But to all she was blind, deaf, unwitting.

For with the conversation upon the ridge-pole of the Milan Cathedral life had seemed to close for her. The finality of Jack’s ruling had barred the future out of her present forever. There is no more unmitigated grief for a woman than to be chained to the consequences begotten of her own way, and to have her judgment taken seriously and acted upon, to the end that all possible chance of change is swept forever beyond the reach of her will.

She hung there against the cold iron and knew no tears, because her wretchedness had outstripped their solace.

Her reasons had reached the pass where they craved to be overruled, and no one was going to overrule them. She did not state the facts to herself in so many words, but she felt her helplessness and moaned her pain.

Oh, that pain! the pain of one who sees the light too late, who divines the sun only by the splendor of the glow which it has left behind. What memories they hold to torture everlastingly! What reveries they nurse from thence on evermore!If only more had been said, or less! If only more had been denied, or granted! There is forever imprinted on the brain some one especial look which time can never dim—some special word whose burden nor sleep nor wake will lighten.

There, at her feet, the Isar rushed, and through the myriad murmur of its rapids his voice came back to her. “Tout est fini,—all is finished!” he had said, with that enveloping mist of melancholy in which his spirit shrouded itself so easily. And then a wax taper flashed before the blackness that sheathed her vision, and she looked in heart-quivering agony upon the dumb appeal of those great, brown eyes, with their shadows doubled by the torturing of the hour.

“He felt perhaps as I feel now,” she thought, pressing her hand against her bosom; “I didn’t know then—I didn’t know!”

She turned to walk along the cliff.

“If I was sure,” she told herself, “I think that I would—” but there she paused, shuddered violently, and left the phrase unfinished.

At luncheon Jack was uncommonly cheerful. He asked her if she didn’t want to go to Nice and spend one of the two days before their departure. She shook her head.

“But why don’t you go?” she said; “you could just as well as not.”“I don’t know but that I will,” he replied; “only I hate to leave you here alone.”

“Oh, I’ll do very well,” she assured him, smiling.

About four that afternoon he came into her room, where she was lying in a reclining-chair by the window, looking listlessly out and dreaming of Munich. He stood before her for a long time, contemplating her and the gown of lace and silk which foamed about her throat and arms, and then cascaded down to spread in billows on the floor.

“I declare,” he said suddenly, “it seems wasteful somehow for you to dress like that just to sit here alone.”

Her mouth curved a little.

“Is that a night-dress?” he inquired curiously.

“No, cousin, it’s a tea-gown.”

“Oh!”

He stood still beside her.

“They told me a funny thing at the steamship office this morning,” he said, after a while; “the man says that there’s never a steamer sails but that some one who has made their last payment down is obliged for some reason to stay behind.”

“Do they give them back their money?” she asked, trying to appear interested.

“Yes; and they always fill the room either at Naples or Gibraltar.”And still he stood there.

“Why don’t you sit down?” she asked at last.

“Where’s Ottillie?” he said, without seeming to notice her question.

“I’ve sent her out to do some errands. Why, do you want anything done?”

“No;” he leaned over and kissed her cheek. “I do love you, Rosina,” he added, half joking, half serious; “I wonder what sort of a show I’d have had if I’d tried—ever?”

She shrank from him with a quick breath.

“Oh, Jack, I beg of you, don’t tease me these days.”

He straightened up and laughed, taking out his watch.

“It’s quarter after four,” he said, reflecting. “The mail must be in; I’ll see if there are any letters,” and he went out.

She remained by the window, twirling the shade-tassel with her idle fingers, and seeing, not the rattle and clatter of Italian street-life, but the great space of the Maximilian-Joseph Platz, with the doves pattering placidly over the white and black pattern of its pavement, and the Maximiliansstrasse stretching before her with the open arches of the Maximilianeum closing its long vista at the further end....

Quick steps in the hall broke in upon her day dream, and her cousin re-entered, an open letter in his hand and his face curiously drawn. He gave her one strange look and halted.

“What has happened?” she asked hastily and anxiously.

He went to the window and looked out, so that his back was turned towards her and his face concealed from her view.

“I’ve just heard from Von Ibn,” he said briefly.

“Is that letter from him?”

“No; he’s not writing any letters these days.”

“Oh—” she began, and then stopped.

He kept his back towards her, and then, after a short pause:

“He’s going all to pieces,” he said in a low tone, very slowly.

“Oh—” she exclaimed again, and again stopped.

“I reckon he’s pretty badly off; he’s got beyond himself. He’s—well, he’s—. Rosina, the long and short of it is, he’s gone crazy!”

She rose slowly out of her seat, her face deadly white, her finger-nails turned cruelly into her palms.

“Jack!” she stammered; “Jack!”

He continued to look from the window.

“I knew he’d take it awfully hard,” he said, in a voice that sounded strained, “but I didn’t think he’d give up so completely; he’s—”

Then she screamed, reaching forth and touching his hand.

“You’re not breaking it to me that he’s dead! You’re not telling me that he’s dead!”

He turned from the window at that, and was shocked at her face and the way that her hands were twisting.

“I know he’s dead!” she screamed again, and he sprang forward and caught her in his arms as she sank down there at his knees.

“He is not dead!” he told her forcefully; “honestly, he is not dead! But he’s in a bad way, and with it all just as it is, I don’t know what to do about you. If you don’t care, why, as I said before, it’s not our funeral; but if you do care, I—well, I—”

“Oh, Jack, can I go to him? I must go to him! Can’t you take me to him?”

She writhed in his arms as if she also was become a maniac.

“Do you really want to go to him? Do you know what that means? It means no more backing out, now or never.”

“I know, I understand, I’m willing! Only hurry! only telegraph that I will come! only—” she began to choke.“I’ll tell you,” said he, putting her into the big chair again; “you shall go to him. Stay there a minute and I’ll get my railway guides and look it up right away. Collect yourself, be a good girl!”

He went out, and she folded her hands and prayed wildly:

“God, let him live! God, take me to him!” over and over again.

And then her impatience stretched the seconds into minutes, and she sought her cousin’s room, which was just across the hall from the suite given to herself.

She flung the door open without knocking and entered precipitately, expecting to find Jack and the railway guides. But Jack was not there.

There was a man there, sitting by the window, twisting his moustache and biting his lips in raging impatience. To this man Jack had said three minutes before, “She’ll be in here in less than sixty seconds. I’m going to the steamship office,” and then the man had been left to wait, and his was not a patient disposition....

A tall man, a dark man, a man whose hair lay in loose, damp, wavy locks above his high forehead; a man whose eyes were heavy-circled underneath, and whose long, white hands beat nervously upon the chair-arms.At the sound of the opening door the man looked up. She was there, staring as if petrified, by the door.

He made one bound. She was within his arms.

“Alors tu m’aimes!” he cried, and something mutual swallowed her reply and the consciousness of both for one long heaven-rifting minute.

“Alors tu m’aimes?” he said again, with a great quivering breath; “tu m’aimes, n’est-ce pas?”

“With my whole heart and soul and life,” she confessed.

And then he kissed her hastily, hungrily, murmuring:

“Ma cherie! my angel, mine, mine!”

She cried a little and laughed a little, looked up a little and looked down a little, tried to draw away from him and found herself drawn yet nearer; was kissed, and kissed him; was looked upon and returned the look; felt the strength of his love and felt the strength of her own; feeling at last that the wavelets of Lucerne which had splashed softly up against the stones at Zurich, and murmured in her ears at Constance, had been swelled by the current of the Isar into a mighty resistless storm that here, this day, upon the rocky coast of the Mediterranean, had come resistlessly roaring upwards, and, sweeping away all barriers, carried her heart and her life out into its bottomless depths forevermore.

“Attends!” he said, after a minute, loosing her suddenly to the end that he might turn the key in Jack’s door; then he took her by the hand and led her to the chair where he had been sitting. It was one of those vast and luxurious fauteuils which have prevented the Old World from ever importing the rocker. He installed her in its depth and placed himself upon the broad and cushioned arm.

“Mon Dieu, que je suis heureux!” he said, smiling down into her eyes; “alors tu m’aimes vraiment?”

“Jack told me that you were terribly ill,” she said, her eyes resting upon his face with a sort of overwhelming content.

“And you have care?”

“I thought that I should lose my mind!”

“Ma cherie!”

“But you really look as if you had been ill?”

“Not ill, but most malheureux. It has not been easy always to wait and believe that you shall love me yet.”

“But you always did believe it?”

He smiled his irresistible smile of eyes and lip.

“Your cousin has said to me in Tagernsee, ‘She will certainly marry you because she declares that she will not, and she always does do exactly le contraire;’ but, Mon Dieu, how could I trust to that?”

Rosina laughed ringingly.

“Dear Jack! I wish that I had known myself as well as he knows me.”

“He has been very good to me,” said Von Ibn, leaning above her and breaking his sentences in a manner that was perhaps only natural, all things considered; “he has kept me from—the real madness. But for him I was quite willing to shoot myself. It has never been anything so terrible for me as—when you enter the door of the pension that night and shut it between us.”

She lifted up her hand and closed his big eyes with its soft touch.

“I loved you in Lucerne,” she declared to his blindness, “that first moment when I saw you walking on the Quai. I did not know why, but I felt that I must know you.”

He snatched her hand away and laughed.

“VoilÀ!” he exclaimed; “what have I say to you that time in Munich, that the women are always gÊnÉes! You love in Lucerne, and insist not for all the summer after.”

Then they laughed together.

“Would you have liked me to have told you there on the Quai? would you have believed it?”“Yes,” he said gravely; “I would have believed it very well, because I also knew the same. In the hotel I had seen you, and on the Promenade I said myself, ‘VoilÀ la jolie AmÉricaine encore une fois!’ You see!”

She wondered how she had ever for a moment thought that his eyes were melancholy, they appeared so big and bright and joyous now.

“When did you come?” she remembered to ask after a long time.

“I am come yesterday morning.”

“Before we did?”

“Oh, yes; because I have very much here to do.”

“In Genoa?”

“Yes; and Jack and I have been out all this morning also.”

“And I never knew!”

He looked a little uneasy and rose to his feet.

“There is something very serious that I must say,” he said, standing before her.

She looked up in a little anxiety; a crowd of ordinary, every-day thoughts suddenly swarmed into her mind.

“Do not be gÊnÉe!” he implored parenthetically; “what I have to say is so most important.”

“I am not gÊnÉe,” she assured him.

“Then why do you not come and stand by me?” he asked. “If you love me and will not show it, I am to be very unhappy always.”

Rosina laughed; but she stood up and went close to him at once.

“I do love you,” she said, “and I am not at all afraid to show it. You see!”

He took her face between his hands and gazed down fondly upon her.

“Love is good, is it not?” he said. “There is a great joy to me to hold you so, and reflect upon those stairs at Munich.”

He paused—perhaps in consideration of the Munichian stairs—for a moment, and then said:

“I have heard that there is love so strong that it crushes; if I ever take hold of you so that your bones break, it is only that I think of the stairs in Munich.”

She laughed again.

“I will remember,” she said, not at all frightened.

He took her two hands tightly within his own.

“I must now say that very serious thing.”

“But I shall not run away.”

“No, but you may be surprised and unarrange yourself before I can hold you to stop.”

“Go on,” she begged.

“It is this: Jack and I have been out all this morning, because all must be very ready; I—” he stopped.

“You are going with us?” she exclaimed joyously.

“No; I—”

“You are not going before we do?”

He smiled and shook his head.

Then he drew her very closely and tenderly to him and kissed her eyes and forehead.

“It is that I am to be married to-morrow,” he told her softly, and held her tightly as the shock of his words ran quivering through her.

“And I!” she gasped, after two or three paralyzed seconds.

“Naturally you are to be married also.”

She stared mutely up into the reassurance of his smile.

“Jack and I find that best,” he said. “I have no time to go to America to bring you again, and all is quite good arranged. I have telegraphed to Dresden about a larger apartment, and those papers from the lawyers in New York waited here when you came. We may not marry like peasants, you and I, you know.”

She felt completely overcome.

“To-morrow!” she said, at last.

“Yes,” he said placidly; “I am much hasted to be again in the north, and we have arranged with the consuls—your consul and my consul—for to-morrow.”

“But my steamer passage!”

“Oh, that your cousin has given up; all the money has been returned. I think for a little that we will go with him as far as Naples, but I go and look at your stateroom this morning, and I have just a centimÉtre more than the berth.”

Rosina was forced to laugh; her humor began to bubble riotously upwards at the notion of Von Ibn and Jack measuring the berth that morning. He did not know why she laughed, but he kissed her without caring.

“For me there is no comfort under two mÉtres,” he declared vigorously.

Just then the owner of the room tried the door.

“This is my room,” he called through the crack.

They looked at each other, and she ran lightly to the door, unlocked it and let her cousin enter.

“You fearful liar!” she exclaimed, as he put his arm about her, and held out the spare hand to her lover. “Oh, Jack, you awful, awful liar, what shall I say to you?”

“Say to him that you are most happy,” her lover suggested.

Jack was beaming.

“I never said a word that wasn’t true,” he declared. “You asked me if the letter was from him, and I said that he wasn’t writing any letters these days, and then I said that he was going crazy.”

“And that was most true,” the other man broke in; “I have no manner to think left in my head these later nights.”

“And you began to scream that you must go to him, and I told you that you could go; and I see that you went.”

Von Ibn crossed to the chimney-piece and picked up a cigarette and a match. He was smiling to himself.

“She consents to be married to-morrow,” he said, facing about.

“Yes,” said Rosina airily; “I see that conventionality and I are to be more two than ever henceforth, so I am going to yield up my own way at once.”

“You are a brave fellow,” Jack said to his friend; “I have always been able to do more with her than any one else, but, honestly, I tell you that I, even I, would never dare to undertake her forever.”

Von Ibn lit his cigarette and laughed.

“She will obey me,” he said easily; “she will have to. It will be a great good for her. I shall be very tender with her and most severe, that is what is best for a woman.“Oh, Rosina!” said Jack, and in his tone resounded a succession of many feelings each more indescribable than its predecessor.

“It is not needful that you kiss her,” the lover went on, coming back across the room; “I wish that you would not, that does me no pleasure to watch.”

“I don’t care anything about kissing her,” the cousin replied; “Rosina’s novelty in kisses was over for me before I was five years old. Don’t you remember—”

Some one rapped at the door.

“Entrez!” they cried in chorus.

It was a garÇon with a card.

“‘Madame La Francesca,’” said Rosina, reading. “Who is Madame La Francesca?”

The two men exchanged glances.

“Where is the lady?” Jack asked.

“She is gone at once to madame’s room,” the boy replied.

“You’d better go and see who’s in your room,” Jack suggested; “and you,” he added, turning to her fiancÉ, “you must come with me and attend to what yet remains to be done.”

Rosina hesitated, her hand upon the door-knob.

“I will come at once,” she told the boy, who was waiting, and then she looked towards the man by the chimney-piece.“Never mind me,” said her cousin kindly; “I’ll look out of the window, if you wish.”

Von Ibn threw his cigarette into the grate.

“You need not look from the window,” he said, laughing; “you may look straight to us, and see two most happy.”

He put his hand on either side of her smile and took the smile to himself. Then she went out.

“I can’t tell you,” the American said warmly, “how glad I am for you both. I do honestly think that she’ll make you very happy. And I hope and pray that you’ll be good to her.”

“I shall be good to her,” said his friend seriously; “I know her well. She is very ‘tendre’ and I love her much; she will not have her own will always, but with her love she will do mine. It is that that makes the life so happy with us. We give much affection and little liberty; it is not well for you, because with you all is so different. In America it is all liberty, and no time for love.”

“Maybe not,” said Jack carelessly; “but we make a lot of money all the same.” He picked up his ulster with the deer-horn buttons. “You’re coming, aren’t you?” he said.

The other man sought an eminently correct overcoat and silk hat in the adjoining room.

“NatÜrlich,” he said, “you know that I am of at any rate an equal interest with you in what is to be to-morrow.”

Jack laughed.

“Perhaps if you knew your lady as well as I do—” he began, and then he stopped.

They went out to the staircase, and Von Ibn descended several steps in advance. Jack contemplated his back, and his lips twitched with the conquering of a rebellious smile.

“So there walks the end of all,” he said to himself. “Who would have thought it of Rosina! Poor girl, she is about over; in fact, I’m afraid that, in the ordinary acceptation of the term, ‘Rosina’ has already ceased to exist—knocked under for good, so to speak. Only to think of that particular girl choosing a thorough-bred European husband with a Tartar syllable in his name!” He paused and chuckled. “I’ve proved my truth to Carter, anyhow. I told him that there was but one man in America clever enough to marry my cousin, and now he’ll perceive that that man’s brains so far surpass the brains of all others, that, although capable of marrying her, he took precious good care to marry her to another fellow. Well, if they’re happy they owe it all to me; and if they’re miserable, they have no one but themselves to blame.”

Von Ibn had paused at the foot of the stairs and now looked up, smiling, into his friend’s eyes.

“I am this day so greatly rejoiced,” he said earnestly, “what life is to have for me, and for her, after this! You may not divine it, I think.”

Jack looked into the warm and shining light of his uplifted face.

“I hope you’ll both be just everlastingly happy,” he said sincerely.

“But that is certain,” the lover said, in a tone of deep feeling. “Did you look at her to-day? It is heaven she brings me with her. We were two in the great world, and Lucerne brought us to one. Then love did all the rest.”

“Oh, I say,” Jack remonstrated; “I certainly worked some too!”