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ELEANOR

BY

MRS. HUMPHRY WARD

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY ALBERT STERNER

1900

TO ITALY THE BELOVED AND BEAUTIFUL, INSTRUCTRESS OF OUR PAST, DELIGHT OF OUR PRESENT, COMRADE OF OUR FUTURE:— THE HEART OF AN ENGLISHWOMAN OFFERS THIS BOOK.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

ELEANOR

THE VILLA

LUCY FOSTER

THE BEAUTIFYING OF LUCY

THE LOGGIA

FATHER BENECKE

PART I.

'I would that you were all to me,
You that are just so much, no more.
Nor yours nor mine, nor slave nor free!
Where does the fault lie? What the core
O' the wound, since wound must be?'

CHAPTER I

'Let us be quite clear, Aunt Pattie—when does this young woman arrive?'

'In about half an hour. But really, Edward, you need take no trouble! she is coming to visit me, and I will see that she doesn't get in your way. Neither you nor Eleanor need trouble your heads about her.'

Miss Manisty—a small elderly lady in a cap—looked at her nephew with a mild and deprecating air. The slight tremor of the hands, which were crossed over the knitting on her lap, betrayed a certain nervousness; but for all that she had the air of managing a familiar difficulty in familiar ways.

The gentleman addressed shook his head impatiently.

'One never prepares for these catastrophes till they actually arrive,' he muttered, taking up a magazine that lay on the table near him, and restlessly playing with the leaves.

'I warned you yesterday.'

'And I forgot—and was happy. Eleanor—what are we going to do with Miss
Foster?'

A lady, who had been sitting at some little distance, rose and came forward.

'Well, I should have thought the answer was simple. Here we are fifteen miles from Rome. The trains might be better—still there are trains. Miss Foster has never been to Europe before. Either Aunt Pattie's maid or mine can take her to all the proper things—or there are plenty of people in Rome—the Westertons—the Borrows?—who at a word from Aunt Pattie would fly to look after her and take her about. I really don't see that you need be so miserable!'

Mrs. Burgoyne stood looking down in some amusement at the aunt and nephew. Edward Manisty, however, was not apparently consoled by her remarks. He began to pace up and down the salon in a disturbance out of all proportion to its cause. And as he walked he threw out phrases of ill-humour, so that at last Miss Manisty, driven to defend herself, put the irresistible question—

'Then why—why—my dear Edward, did you make me invite her? For it was really his doing—wasn't it, Eleanor?'

'Yes—I am witness!'

'One of those abominable flashes of conscience that have so much to answer for!' said Manisty, throwing up his hand in annoyance.—'If she had come to us in Rome, one could have provided for her. But here in this solitude—just at the most critical moment of one's work—and it's all very well—but one can't treat a young lady, when she is actually in one's house, as if she were the tongs!'

He stood beside the window, with his hands on his sides, moodily looking out. Thus strongly defined against the sunset light, he would have impressed himself on a stranger as a man no longer in his first youth, extraordinarily handsome so far as the head was concerned, but of a somewhat irregular and stunted figure; stunted, however, only in comparison with what it had to carry; for in fact he was of about middle height. But the head, face and shoulders were all remarkably large and powerful; the colouring—curly black hair, grey eyes, dark complexion—singularly vivid; and the lines of the brow, the long nose, the energetic mouth, in their mingled force and perfection, had made the stimulus of many an artist before now. For Edward Manisty was one of those men of note whose portraits the world likes to paint: and this 'Olympian head' of his was well known in many a French and English studio, through a fine drawing of it made by Legros when Manisty was still a youth at Oxford. 'Begun by David—and finished by Rembrandt': so a young French painter had once described Edward Manisty.

The final effect of this discord, however, was an effect of power—of personality—of something that claimed and held attention. So at least it was described by Manisty's friends. Manisty's enemies, of whom the world contained no small number, had other words for it. But women in general took the more complimentary view.

The two women now in his company were clearly much affected by the force—wilfulness—extravagance—for one might call it by any of these names—that breathed from the man before them. Miss Manisty, his aunt, followed his movements with her small blinking eyes, timidly uneasy, but yet visibly conscious all the time that she had done nothing that any reasonable man could rationally complain of; while in the manner towards him of his widowed cousin Mrs. Burgoyne, in the few words of banter or remonstrance that she threw him on the subject of his aunt's expected visitor, there was an indulgence, a deference even, that his irritation scarcely deserved.

'At least, give me some account of this girl'—he said, breaking in upon his aunt's explanations. 'I have really not given her a thought—and—good heavens!—she will be here, you say, in half an hour. Is she young—stupid—pretty? Has she any experience—any conversation?'

'I read you Adèle's letter on Monday,' said Miss Manisty, in a tone of patience—'and I told you then all I knew—but I noticed you didn't listen. I only saw her myself for a few hours at Boston. I remember she was rather good-looking—but very shy, and not a bit like all the other girls one was seeing. Her clothes were odd, and dowdy, and too old for her altogether,—which struck me as curious, for the American girls, even the country ones, have such a natural turn for dressing themselves. Her Boston cousins didn't like it, and they tried to buy her things—but she was difficult to manage—and they had to give it up. Still they were very fond of her, I remember. Only she didn't let them show it much. Her manners were much stiffer than theirs. They said she was very countrified and simple—that she had been brought up quite alone by their old uncle, in a little country town—and hardly ever went away from home.'

'And Edward never saw her?' inquired Mrs. Burgoyne, with a motion of the head towards Manisty.

'No. He was at Chicago just those days. But you never saw anything like the kindness of the cousins! Luncheons and dinners!'—Miss Manisty raised her little gouty hands—'my dear—when we left Boston I never wanted to eat again. It would be simply indecent if we did nothing for this girl. English people are so ungrateful this side of the water. It makes me hot when I think of all they do for us.'

The small lady's blanched and wrinkled face reddened a little with a colour which became her. Manisty, lost in irritable reflection, apparently took no notice.

'But why did they send her out all alone?' said Mrs. Burgoyne. 'Couldn't they have found some family for her to travel with?'

'Well, it was a series of accidents. She did come over with some Boston people—the Porters—we knew very well. And they hadn't been three days in London before one of the daughters developed meningitis, and was at the point of death. And of course they could go nowhere and see nothing—and poor Lucy Foster felt herself in the way. Then she was to have joined some other people in Italy, and they changed their plans. And at last I got a letter from Mrs. Porter—in despair—asking me if I knew of anyone in Rome who would take her in and chaperon her. And then—well, then you know the rest.'

And the speaker nodded again, still more significantly, towards her nephew.

'No, not all,' said Mrs. Burgoyne, laughing. 'I remember he telegraphed.'

'Yes. He wouldn't even wait for me to write. No—"Of course we must have the girl!" he said. "She can join us at the villa. And they'll want to know, so I'll wire." And out he went. And then that evening I had to write and ask her to stay as long as she wished—and—well, there it is!'

'And hence these tears,' said Mrs. Burgoyne. 'What possessed him?'

'Well, I think it was conscience,' said the little spinster, plucking up spirit. 'I know it was with me. There had been some Americans calling on us that day—you remember—those charming Harvard people? And somehow it recalled to us both what a fuss they had made with us—and how kind everybody was. At least I suppose that was how Edward felt. I know I did.'

Manisty paused in his walk. For the first time his dark whimsical face was crossed by an unwilling smile—slight but agreeable.

'It is the old story,' he said. 'Life would be tolerable but for one's virtues. All this time, I beg to point out, Aunt Pattie, that you have still told us nothing about the young lady—except something about her clothes, which doesn't matter.'

Mrs. Burgoyne's amused gesture showed the woman's view of this remark. Miss
Manisty looked puzzled.

'Well—I don't know. Yes—I have told you a great deal. The Lewinsons apparently thought her rather strange. Adèle said she couldn't tell what to be at with her—you never knew what she would like or dislike. Tom Lewinson seems to have liked her better than Adèle did. He said "there was no nonsense about her—and she never kept a fellow waiting." Adèle says she is the oddest mixture of knowledge and ignorance. She would ask the most absurd elementary questions—and then one morning Tom found out that she was quite a Latin scholar, and had read Horace and Virgil, and all the rest.'

'Good God!' said Manisty under his breath, resuming his walk.

'And when they asked her to play, she played—quite respectably.'

'Of course:—two hours' practising in the morning,—I foresaw it,' said Manisty, stopping short. 'Eleanor, we have been like children sporting over the abyss!'

Mrs. Burgoyne rose with a laugh—a very soft and charming laugh—by no means the least among the various gifts with which nature had endowed her.

'Oh, civilisation has resources,' she said—'Aunt Pattie and I will take care of you. Now we have got a quarter of an hour to dress in. Only first—one must really pay one's respects to this sunset.'

And she stepped out through an open door upon a balcony beyond. Then turning, with a face of delight, she beckoned to Manisty, who followed.

'Every night more marvellous than the last'—she said, hanging over the balustrade—'and one seems to be here in the high box of a theatre, with the sun playing pageants for our particular benefit.'

Before them, beneath them indeed, stretched a scene, majestic, incomparable. The old villa in which they stood was built high on the ridge of the Alban Hills. Below it, olive-grounds and vineyards, plough-lands and pine plantations sank, slope after slope, fold after fold, to the Campagna. And beyond the Campagna, along the whole shining line of the west, the sea met the sunset; while to the north, a dim and scattered whiteness rising from the plain—was Rome.

The sunset was rushing to its height through every possible phase of violence and splendour. From the Mediterranean, storm-clouds were rising fast to the assault and conquest of the upper sky, which still above the hills shone blue and tranquil. But the north-west wind and the sea were leagued against it. They sent out threatening fingers and long spinning veils of cloud across it—skirmishers that foretold the black and serried lines, the torn and monstrous masses behind. Below these wild tempest shapes, again,—in long spaces resting on the sea—the heaven was at peace, shining in delicate greens and yellows, infinitely translucent and serene, above the dazzling lines of water. Over Rome itself there was a strange massing and curving of the clouds. Between their blackness and the deep purple of the Campagna, rose the city—pale phantom—upholding one great dome, and one only, to the view of night and the world. Round and above and behind, beneath the long flat arch of the storm, glowed a furnace of scarlet light. The buildings of the city were faint specks within its fierce intensity, dimly visible through a sea of fire. St. Peter's alone, without visible foundation or support, had consistence, form, identity.—And between the city and the hills, waves of blue and purple shade, forerunners of the night, stole over the Campagna towards the higher ground. But the hills themselves were still shining, still clad in rose and amethyst, caught in gentler repetition from the wildness of the west. Pale rose even the olive-gardens; rose the rich brown fallows, the emerging farms; while drawn across the Campagna from north to south, as though some mighty brush had just laid it there for sheer lust of colour, sheer joy in the mating it with the rose,—one long strip of sharpest, purest green.

Mrs. Burgoyne turned at last from the great spectacle to her companion.

'One has really no adjectives left,' she said. 'But I had used mine up within a week.'

'It still gives you so much pleasure?' he said, looking at her a little askance.

Her face changed at once.

'And you?—you are beginning to be tired of it?'

'One gets a sort of indigestion.—Oh! I shall be all right to-morrow.'

Both were silent for a moment. Then he resumed.—

'I met General Fenton in the Borgia rooms this morning.'

She turned, with a quick look of curiosity.

'Well?'

'I hadn't seen him since I met him at Simla three years ago. I always found him particularly agreeable then. We used to ride together and talk together,—and he put me in the way of seeing a good many things. This morning he received me with a change of manner—can't exactly describe it; but it was not flattering! So I presently left him to his own devices and went on into another room. Then he followed me, and seemed to wish to talk. Perhaps he perceived that he had been unfriendly, and thought he would make amends. But I was rather short with him. We had been real friends; we hadn't met for three years; and I thought he might have behaved differently. He asked me a number of questions, however, about last year, about my resignation, and so forth; and I answered as little as I could. So presently he looked at me and laughed—"You remind me," he said, "of what somebody said of Peel—that he was bad to go up to in the stable!—But what on earth are you in the stable for?—and not in the running?"'

Mrs. Burgoyne smiled.

'He was evidently bored with the pictures!' she said, dryly.

Manisty gave a shrug. 'Oh! I let him off. I wouldn't be drawn. I told him I had expressed myself so much in public there was nothing more to say. "H'm," he said, "they tell me at the Embassy you're writing a book!" You should have seen the little old fellow's wizened face—and the scorn of it! So I inquired whether there was any objection to the writing of books. "Yes!"—he said—"when a man can do a d——d sight better for himself—as you could! Everyone tells me that last year you had the ball at your feet." "Well,"—I said—"and I kicked it—and am still kicking it—in my own way. It mayn't be yours—or anybody else's—but wait and see." He shook his head. "A man with what were your prospects can't afford escapades. It's all very well for a Frenchman; it don't pay in England." So then I maintained that half the political reputations of the present day were based on escapades. "Whom do you mean?"—he said—"Randolph Churchill?—But Randolph's escapades were always just what the man in the street understood. As for your escapade, the man in the street can't make head or tail of it. That's just the, difference."'

Mrs. Burgoyne laughed—but rather impatiently.

'I should like to know when General Fenton ever considered the man in the street!'

'Not at Simla certainly. There you may despise him.—But the old man is right enough as to the part he plays in England.—I gathered that all my old Indian friends thought I had done for myself. There was no sympathy for me anywhere. Oh!—as to the cause I upheld—yes. But none as to the mode of doing it.'

'Well—there is plenty of sympathy elsewhere! What does it matter what dried-up officials like General Fenton choose to think about it?'

'Nothing—so long as there are no doubts inside to open the gates to the
General Fentons outside!'

He looked at her oddly—half smiling, half frowning.

'The doubts are traitors. Send them to execution!' He shook his head.

'Do you remember that sentence we came across yesterday in Chateaubriand's letters "As to my career—I have gone from shipwreck to shipwreck." What if I am merely bound on the same charming voyage?'

'I accept the comparison,' she said with vivacity. 'End as he did in re-creating a church, and regenerating a literature—and see who will count the shipwrecks!'

Her hand's disdainful gesture completed the sally.

Manisty's face dismissed its shadow.

As she stood beside him, in the rosy light—so proudly confident—Eleanor Burgoyne was very delightful to see and hear. Manisty, one of the subtlest and most fastidious of observers, was abundantly conscious of it. Yet she was not beautiful, except in the judgment of a few exceptional people, to whom a certain kind of grace—very rare, and very complex in origin—is of more importance than other things. The eyes were, indeed, beautiful; so was the forehead, and the hair of a soft ashy brown folded and piled round it in a most skilful simplicity. But the rest of the face was too long; and its pallor, the singularly dark circles round the eyes, the great thinness of the temples and cheeks, together with the emaciation of the whole delicate frame, made a rather painful impression on a stranger. It was a face of experience, a face of grief; timid, yet with many strange capacities and suggestions both of vehemence and pride. It could still tremble into youth and delight. But in general it held the world aloof. Mrs. Burgoyne was not very far from thirty, and either physical weakness, or the presence of some enemy within more destructive still, had emphasised the loss of youth. At the same time she had still a voice, a hand, a carriage that lovelier women had often envied, discerning in them those subtleties of race and personality which are not to be rivalled for the asking.

To-night she brought all her charm to bear upon her companion's despondency, and succeeded as she had often succeeded before. She divined that he needed flattery, and she gave it; that he must be supported and endorsed, and she had soon pushed General Fenton out of sight behind a cloud of witness of another sort.

Manisty's mood yielded; and in a short time he was again no less ready to admire the sunset than she was.

'Heavens!' she said at last, holding out her watch.—'Just look at the time—and Miss Foster!'

Manisty struck his hand against the railing.

'How is one to be civil about this visit! Nothing could be more unfortunate. These last critical weeks—and each of us so dependent on the other—Really it is the most monstrous folly on all our parts that we should have brought this girl upon us.'

'Poor Miss Foster!' said Mrs. Burgoyne, raising her eyebrows. 'But of course you won't be civil!—Aunt Pattie and I know that. When I think of what I went through that first fortnight—'

'Eleanor!'

'You are the only man I ever knew that could sit silent through a whole meal. By to-morrow Miss Foster will have added that experience to her collection. Well—I shall be prepared with my consolations—there's the carriage—and the bell!'

They fled indoors, escaping through the side entrances of the salon, before the visitor could be shown in.

* * * * *

'Must I change my dress?'

The voice that asked the question trembled with agitation and fatigue. But the girl who owned the voice stood up stiffly, looking at Miss Manisty with a frowning, almost a threatening shyness.

'Well, my dear,' said Miss Manisty, hesitating. 'Are you not rather dusty?
We can easily keep dinner a quarter of an hour.'

She looked at the grey alpaca dress before her, in some perplexity.

'Oh, very well'—said the girl hurriedly.—'Of course I'll change. Only'—and the voice fluttered again evidently against her will—'I'm afraid I haven't anything very nice. I must get something in Rome. Mrs. Lewinson advised me. This is my afternoon dress,—I've been wearing it in Florence. But of course—I'll put on my other.—Oh! please don't send for a maid. I'd rather unpack for myself—so much rather!'

The speaker flushed crimson, as she saw Miss Manisty's maid enter the room in answer to her mistress's ring. She stood up indeed with her hand grasping her trunk, as though defending it from an assailant.

The maid looked at her mistress. 'Miss Foster will ring, Benson, if she wants you'—said Miss Manisty; and the black-robed elderly maid, breathing decorous fashion and the ways of 'the best people,' turned, gave a swift look at Miss Foster, and left the room.

'Are you sure, my dear? You know she would make you tidy in no time. She arranges hair beautifully.'

'Oh quite—quite sure!—thank you,' said the girl with the same eagerness.
'I will be ready,—right away.'

Then, left to herself, Miss Foster hastily opened her box and took out some of its contents. She unfolded one dress after another,—and looked at them unhappily.

'Perhaps I ought to have let cousin Izza give me those things in Boston,' she thought. 'Perhaps I was too proud. And that money of Uncle Ben's—it might have been kinder—after all he wanted me to look nice'—

She sat ruefully on the ground beside her trunk, turning the things over, in a misery of annoyance and mortification; half inclined to laugh too as she remembered the seamstress in the small New England country town, who had helped her own hands to manufacture them. 'Well, Miss Lucy, your uncle's done real handsome by you. I guess he's set you up, and no mistake. There's no meanness about him!'

And she saw the dress on the stand—the little blonde withered head of the dressmaker—the spectacled eyes dwelling proudly on the masterpiece before them.—

Alack! There rose up the memory of little Mrs. Lewinson at Florence—of her gently pursed lips—of the looks that were meant to be kind, and were in reality so critical.

No matter. The choice had to be made; and she chose at last a blue and white check that seemed to have borne its travels better than the rest. It had looked so fresh and striking in the window of the shop whence she had bought it. 'And you know, Miss Lucy, you're so tall, you can stand them chancy things'—her little friend had said to her, when she had wondered whether the check might not be too large.

And yet only with a passing wonder. She could not honestly say that her dress had cost her much thought then or at any other time. She had been content to be very simple, to admire other girls' cleverness. There had been influences upon her own childhood, however, that had somehow separated her from the girls around her, had made it difficult for her to think and plan as they did.

She rose with the dress in her hands, and as she did so, she caught the glory of the sunset through the open window.

She ran to look, all her senses flooded with the sudden beauty,—when she heard a man's voice as it seemed close beside her. Looking to the left, she distinguished a balcony, and a dark figure that had just emerged upon it.

Mr. Manisty—no doubt! She closed her window hurriedly, and began her dressing, trying at the time to collect her thoughts on the subject of these people whom she had come to visit.

Yet neither the talk of her Boston cousins, nor the gossip of the Lewinsons at Florence had left any very clear impression. She remembered well her first and only sight of Miss Manisty at Boston. The little spinster, so much a lady, so kind, cheerful and agreeable, had left a very favourable impression in America. Mr. Manisty had left an impression too—that was certain—for people talked of him perpetually. Not many persons, however, had liked him, it seemed. She could remember, as it were, a whole track of resentments, hostilities, left behind. 'He cares nothing about us'—an irate Boston lady had said in her hearing—but he will exploit us! He despises us,—but he'll make plenty of speeches and articles out of us—you'll see!'

As for Major Lewinson, the husband of Mr. Manisty's first cousin,—she had been conscious all the time of only half believing what he said, of holding out against it. He must be so different from Mr. Manisty—the little smart, quick-tempered soldier—with his contempt for the undisciplined civilian way of doing things. She did not mean to remember his remarks. For after all, she had her own ideas of what Mr. Manisty would be like. She had secretly formed her own opinion. He had been a man of letters and a traveller before he entered politics. She remembered—nay, she would never forget—a volume of letters from Palestine, written by him, which had reached her through the free library of the little town near her home. She who read slowly, but, when she admired, with a silent and worshipping ardour, had read this book, had hidden it under her pillow, had been haunted for days by its pliant sonorous sentences, by the colour, the perfume, the melancholy of pages that seemed to her dreaming youth marvellous, inimitable. There were descriptions of a dawn at Bethlehem—a night wandering at Jerusalem—a reverie by the sea of Galilee—the very thought of which made her shiver a little, so deeply had they touched her young and pure imagination.

And then—people talked so angrily of his quarrel with the Government—and
his resigning. They said he had been foolish, arrogant, unwise. Perhaps.
But after all it had been to his own hurt—it must have been for principle.
So far the girl's secret instinct was all on his side.

Meanwhile, as she dressed, there floated through her mind fragments of what she had been told as to his strange personal beauty; but these she only entertained shyly and in passing. She had been brought up to think little of such matters, or rather to avoid thinking of them.

She went through her toilette as neatly and rapidly as she could, her mind all the time so full of speculation and a deep restrained excitement that she ceased to trouble herself in the least about her gown. As for her hair, she arranged it almost mechanically, caring only that its black masses should be smooth and in order. She fastened at her throat a small turquoise brooch that had been her mother's; she clasped the two little chain bracelets that were the only ornaments of the kind she possessed, and then without a single backward look towards the reflection in the glass, she left her room—her heart beating fast with timidity and expectation.

* * * * *

'Oh! poor child—poor child!—what a frock!'

Such was the inward ejaculation of Mrs. Burgoyne, as the door of the salon was thrown open by the Italian butler, and a very tall girl came abruptly through, edging to one side as though she were trying to escape the servant, and looking anxiously round the vast room.

Manisty also turned as the door opened. Miss Manisty caught his momentary expression of wonder, as she herself hurried forward to meet the new-comer.

'You have been very quick, my dear, and I am sure you must be hungry.—This is an old friend of ours—Mrs. Burgoyne—my nephew—Edward Manisty. He knows all your Boston cousins, if not you. Edward, will you take Miss Foster?—she's the stranger.'

Mrs. Burgoyne pressed the girl's hand with a friendly effusion. Beyond her was a dark-haired man, who bowed in silence. Lucy Foster took his arm, and he led her through a large intervening room, in which were many tables and many books, to the dining-room.

On the way he muttered a few embarrassed words as to the weather and the lateness of dinner, walking meanwhile so fast that she had to hurry after him. 'Good heavens, why she is a perfect chess-board!' he thought to himself, looking askance at her dress, in a sudden and passionate dislike—'one could play draughts upon her. What has my Aunt been about?'

The girl looked round her in bewilderment as they sat down. What a strange place! The salon in her momentary glance round it had seemed to her all splendour. She had been dimly aware of pictures, fine hangings, luxurious carpets. Here on the other hand all was rude and bare. The stained walls were covered with a series of tattered daubs, that seemed to be meant for family portraits—of the Malestrini family perhaps, to whom the villa belonged? And between the portraits there were rough modern doors everywhere of the commonest wood and manufacture which let in all the draughts, and made the room not a room, but a passage. The uneven brick floor was covered in the centre with some thin and torn matting; many of the chairs ranged against the wall were broken; and the old lamp that swung above the table gave hardly any light.

Miss Manisty watched her guest's face with a look of amusement.

'Well, what do you think of our dining-room, my dear? I wanted to clean it and put it in order. But my nephew there wouldn't have a thing touched.'

She looked at Manisty, with a movement of the lips and head that seemed to implore him to make some efforts.

Manisty frowned a little, lifted his great brow and looked, not at Miss
Foster, but at Mrs. Burgoyne—

'The room, as it happens, gives me more pleasure than any other in the villa.'

Mrs. Burgoyne laughed.

'Because it's hideous?'

'If you like. I should only call it the natural, untouched thing.'

Then while his Aunt and Mrs. Burgoyne made mock of him, he fell silent again, nervously crumbling his bread with a large wasteful hand. Lucy Foster stole a look at him, at the strong curls of black hair piled above the brow, the moody embarrassment of the eyes, the energy of the lips and chin.

Then she turned to her companions. Suddenly the girl's clear brown skin flushed rosily, and she abruptly took her eyes from Mrs. Burgoyne.

Miss Manisty, however—in despair of her nephew—was bent upon doing her own duty. She asked all the proper questions about the girl's journey, about the cousins at Florence, about her last letters from home. Miss Foster answered quickly, a little breathlessly, as though each question were an ordeal that had to be got through. And once or twice, in the course of the conversation, she looked again at Mrs. Burgoyne, more lingeringly each time. That lady wore a thin dress gleaming with jet. The long white arms showed under the transparent stuff. The slender neck and delicate bosom were bare,—too bare surely,—that was the trouble. To look at her filled the girl's shrinking Puritan sense with discomfort. But what small and graceful hands!—and how she used them!—how she turned her neck!—how delicious her voice was! It made the new-comer think of some sweet plashing stream in her own Vermont valleys. And then, every now and again, how subtle and startling was the change of look!—the gaiety passing in a moment, with the drooping of eye and mouth, into something sad and harsh, like a cloud dropping round a goddess. In her elegance and self-possession indeed, she seemed to the girl a kind of goddess—heathenishly divine, because of that mixture of unseemliness, but still divine.

Several times Mrs. Burgoyne addressed her—with a gentle courtesy—and Miss Foster answered. She was shy, but not at all awkward or conscious. Her manner had the essential self-possession which is the birthright of the American woman. But it suggested reserve, and a curious absence of any young desire to make an effect.

As for Mrs. Burgoyne, long before dinner was over, she had divined a great many things about the new-comer, and amongst them the girl's disapproval of herself. 'After all'—she thought—'if she only knew it, she is a beauty. What a trouble it must have been first to find, and then to make that dress!—Ill luck!—And her hair! Who on earth taught her to drag it back like that? If one could only loosen it, how beautiful it would be! What is it? Is it Puritanism? Has she been brought up to go to meetings and sit under a minister? Were her forbears married in drawing-rooms and under trees? The Fates were certainly frolicking when they brought her here! How am I to keep Edward in order?'

And suddenly, with a little signalling of eye and brow, she too conveyed to Manisty, who was looking listlessly towards her, that he was behaving as badly as even she could have expected. He made a little face that only she saw, but he turned to Miss Foster and began to talk,—all the time adding to the mountain of crumbs beside him, and scarcely waiting to listen to the girl's answers.

'You came by Pisa?'

'Yes. Mrs. Lewinson found me an escort—'

'It was a mistake—' he said, hurrying his words like a schoolboy. 'You should have come by Perugia and Spoleto. Do you know Spello?'

Miss Foster stared.

'Edward!' said Miss Manisty, 'how could she have heard of Spello? It is the first time she has ever been in Italy.'

'No matter!' he said, and in a moment his moroseness was lit up, chased away by the little pleasure of his own whim—'Some day Miss Foster must hear of Spello. May I not be the first person to tell her that she should see Spello?'

'Really, Edward!' cried Miss Manisty, looking at him in a mild exasperation.

'But there was so much to see at Florence!' said Lucy Foster, wondering.

'No—pardon me!—there is nothing to be seen at Florence—or nothing that one ought to wish to see—till the destroyers of the town have been hung in their own new Piazza!'

'Oh yes!—that is a real disfigurement!' said the girl eagerly. 'And yet—can't one understand?—they must use their towns for themselves. They can't always be thinking of them as museums—as we do.'

'The argument would be good if the towns were theirs,' he said, flashing round upon her. 'One can stand a great deal from lawful owners.'

Miss Foster looked in bewilderment at Mrs. Burgoyne. That lady laughed and bent across the table.

'Let me warn you, Miss Foster, this gentleman here must be taken with a grain of salt when he talks about poor Italy—and the Italians.'

'But I thought'—said Lucy Foster, staring at her host—

'You thought he was writing a book on Italy? That doesn't matter. It's the new Italy of course that he hates—the poor King and Queen—the Government and the officials.'

'He wants the old times back?'—said Miss Foster, wondering—'when the priests tyrannised over everybody? when the Italians had no country—and no unity?'

She spoke slowly, at last looking her host in the face. Her frown of nervousness had disappeared. Manisty laughed.

'Pio Nono pulled down nothing—not a brick—or scarcely. And it is a most excellent thing, Miss Foster, to be tyrannised over by priests.'

His great eyes shone—one might even say, glared upon her. His manner was not agreeable; and Miss Foster coloured.

'I don't think so'—she said, and then was too shy to say any more.

'Oh, but you will think so,'—he said, obstinately—'only you must stay long enough in the country. What people are pleased to call Papal tyranny puts a few people in prison—and tells them what books to read. Well!—what matter? Who knows what books they ought to read?'

'But all their long struggle!—and their heroes! They had to make themselves a nation—'

The words stumbled on the girl's tongue, but her effort, the hot feeling in her young face became her.—Miss Manisty thought to herself, 'Oh, we shall dress, and improve her—We shall see!'—

'One has first to settle whether it was worth while. What does a new nation matter? Theirs, anyway, was made too quick,' said Manisty, rising in answer to his aunt's signal.

'But liberty matters!' said the girl. She stood an instant with her hand on the back of her chair, unconsciously defiant.

'Ah! Liberty!' said Manisty—'Liberty!' He lifted his shoulders contemptuously.

Then backing to the wall, he made room for her to pass. The girl felt almost as though she had been struck. She moved hurriedly, appealingly towards Miss Manisty, who took her arm kindly as they left the room.

'Don't let my nephew frighten you, my dear'—she said—'He never thinks like anybody else.'

'I read so much at Florence—and on the journey'—said Lucy, while her hand trembled in Miss Manisty's—'Mrs. Browning—Mazzini—many things. I could not put that time out of my head!'

CHAPTER II

On the way back to the salon the ladies passed once more through the large book-room or library which lay between it and the dining-room. Lucy Foster looked round it, a little piteously, as though she were seeking for something to undo the impression—the disappointment—she had just received.

'Oh! my dear, you never saw such a place as it was when we arrived in March'—said Miss Manisty. 'It was the billiard-room—a ridiculous table—and ridiculous balls—and a tiled floor without a scrap of carpet—and the cold! In the whole apartment there were just two bedrooms with fireplaces. Eleanor went to bed in one; I went to bed in the other. No carpets—no stoves—no proper beds even. Edward of course said it was all charming, and the climate balmy. Ah, well!—now we are really quite comfortable—except in that odious dining-room, which Edward will have left in its sins.'

Miss Manisty surveyed her work with a mild satisfaction. The table indeed had been carried away. The floor was covered with soft carpets. The rough uneven walls painted everywhere with the interlaced M's of the Malestrini were almost hidden by well-filled bookcases; and, in addition, a profusion of new books, mostly French and Italian, was heaped on all the tables. On the mantelpiece a large recent photograph stood propped against a marble head. It represented a soldier in a striking dress; and Lucy stopped to look at it.

'One of the Swiss Guards—at the Vatican'—said Mrs. Burgoyne kindly. 'You know the famous uniform—it was designed by Michael Angelo.'

'No—I didn't know'—said the girl, flushing again.—'And this head?'

'Ah, that is a treasure! Mr. Manisty bought it a few months ago from a Roman noble who has come to grief. He sold this and a few bits of furniture first of all. Then he tried to sell his pictures. But the Government came down upon him—you know your pictures are not your own in Italy. So the poor man must keep his pictures and go bankrupt. But isn't she beautiful? She is far finer than most of the things in the Vatican—real primitive Greek—not a copy. Do you know'—Mrs. Burgoyne stepped back, looked first at the bust, then at Miss Poster—'do you know you are really very like her—curiously like her!'

'Oh!'—cried Miss Foster in confusion—'I wish—'

'But it is quite true. Except for the hair. And that's only arrangement. Do you think—would you let me?—would you forgive me?—It's just this band of hair here, yours waves precisely in the same way. Would you really allow me—I won't make you untidy?'

And before Miss Poster could resist, Mrs. Burgoyne had put up her deft hands, and in a moment, with a pull here, and the alteration of a hairpin there, she had loosened the girl's black and silky hair, till it showed the beautiful waves above the ear in which it did indeed resemble the marble head with a curious closeness.

'I can put it back in a moment. But oh—that is so charming! Aunt Pattie!'

Miss Manisty looked up from a newspaper which had just arrived.

'My dear!—that was bold of you I But indeed it is charming! I think I would forgive you if I were Miss Foster.

The girl felt herself gently turned towards the mirror that rose behind the Greek head. With pink cheeks she too looked at herself for a moment. Then in a shyness beyond speech, she lifted her hands.

'Must you'—said Mrs. Burgoyne appealingly. 'I know one doesn't like to be untidy. But it isn't really the least untidy—It is only delightful—perfectly delightful!'

Her voice, her manner charmed the girl's annoyance.

'If you like it'—she said, hesitating—'But it will come down!'

'I like it terribly—and it will not think of coming down! Let me show you
Mr. Manisty's latest purchase.'

And, slipping her arm inside Miss Foster's, Mrs. Burgoyne dexterously turned her away from the glass, and brought her to the large central table, where a vivid charcoal sketch, supported on a small easel, rose among the litter of books.

It represented an old old man carried in a chair on the shoulders of a crowd of attendants and guards. Soldiers in curved helmets, courtiers in short velvet cloaks and ruffs, priests in floating vestments pressed about him—a dim vast multitude stretched into the distance. The old man wore a high cap with three lines about it; his thin and shrunken form was enveloped in a gorgeous robe. The face, infinitely old, was concentrated in the sharply smiling eyes, the long, straight, secret mouth. His arm, supporting with difficulty the weight of the robe, was raised,—the hand blessed. On either side of him rose great fans of white ostrich feathers, and the old man among them was whiter than they, spectrally white from head to foot, save for the triple cap, and the devices on his robe. But into his emaciation, his weakness, the artist had thrown a triumph, a force that thrilled the spectator. The small figure, hovering above the crowd, seemed in truth to have nothing to do with it, to be alone with the huge spaces—arch on arch—dome on dome—of the vast church through which it was being borne.—

'Do you know who it is?' asked Mrs. Burgoyne, smiling.

'The—the Pope?' said Miss Foster, wondering.

'Isn't it clever? It is by one of your compatriots, an American artist in Rome. Isn't it wonderful too, the way in which it shows you, not the Pope—but the Papacy—not the man but the Church?'

Miss Foster said nothing. Her puzzled eyes travelled from the drawing to Mrs. Burgoyne's face. Then she caught sight of another photograph on the table.

'And that also?'—she said—For again it was the face of Leo XIII.—feminine, priestly, indomitable—that looked out upon her from among the books.

'Oh, my dear, come away,' said Miss Manisty impatiently. 'In my days the Scarlet Lady was the Scarlet Lady, and we didn't flirt with her as all the world does now. Shrewd old gentleman! I should have thought one picture of him was enough.'

* * * * *

As they entered the old painted salon, Mrs. Burgoyne went to one of the tall windows opening to the floor and set it wide. Instantly the Campagna was in the room—the great moonlit plain, a thousand feet below, with the sea at its further edge, and the boundless sweep of starry sky above it. From the little balcony, one might, it seemed, have walked straight into Orion. The note of a nightingale bubbled up from the olives; and the scent of a bean-field in flower flooded the salon.

Miss Foster sprang to her feet and followed Mrs. Burgoyne. She hung over the balcony while her companion pointed here and there, to the line of the Appian Way,—to those faint streaks in the darkness that marked the distant city—to the dim blue of the Etrurian mountains.—

Presently, however, she drew herself erect, and Mrs. Burgoyne fancied that she shivered.

'Ah! this is a hill-air,' she said, and she took from her arm a light evening cloak, and threw it round Miss Foster.

'Oh, I am not cold!—It wasn't that!'

'What was it?' said Mrs. Burgoyne pleasantly. 'That you feel Italy too much for you? Ah! you must get used to that.'

Lucy Foster drew a long breath—a breath of emotion. She was grateful for being understood. But she could not express herself.

Mrs. Burgoyne looked at her curiously.

'Did you read a good deal about it before you came?'

'Well, I read some—we have a good town library—and Uncle Ben gave me two or three books—but of course it wasn't like Boston. Ours is a little place.'

'And you were pleased to come?'

The girl hesitated.

'Yes'—she said simply. 'I wanted to come.—But I didn't want to leave my uncle. He is getting quite an old man.'

'And you have lived with him a long time?'

'Since I was a little thing. Mother and I came to live with him after
Father died. Then Mother died, five years ago.'

'And you have been alone—and very good friends?'

Mrs. Burgoyne smiled kindly. She had a manner of questioning that seemed to Miss Foster the height of courtesy. But the girl did not find it easy to answer.

'I have no one else—' she said at last, and then stopped abruptly.

'She is home-sick'—said Mrs. Burgoyne inwardly—'I wonder whether the
Lewinsons treated her nicely at Florence?'

Indeed as Lucy Foster leant over the balcony, the olive-gardens and vineyards faded before her. She saw in their stead, the snow-covered farms and fields of a New England valley—the elms in along village street, bare and wintry—a rambling wooden house—a glowing fire, in a simple parlour—an old man sitting beside it.—

It is chilly'—said Mrs. Burgoyne—'Let us go in. But we will keep the window open. Don't take that off.'

She laid a restraining hand on the girl's arm. Miss Foster sat down absently not far from the window. The mingled lights of lamp and moon fell upon her, upon the noble rounding of the face, which was grave, a little austere even, but still sensitive and delicate. Her black hair, thanks to Mrs. Burgoyne's devices, rippled against the brow and cheek, almost hiding the small ear. The graceful cloak, with its touches of sable on a main fabric of soft white, hid the ugly dress; its ample folds heightened the natural dignity of the young form and long limbs, lent them a stately and muse-like charm. Mrs. Burgoyne and Miss Manisty looked at each other, then at Miss Foster. Both of them had the same curious feeling, as though a veil were being drawn away from something they were just beginning to see.

'You must be very tired, my dear'—said Miss Manisty at last, when she and Mrs. Burgoyne had chatted a good deal, and the new-comer still sat silent—'I wonder what you are thinking about so intently?'

Miss Foster woke up at once.

'Oh, I'm not a bit tired—not a bit! I was thinking—I was thinking of that photograph in the next room—and a line of poetry.'

She spoke with the naïveté of one who had not known how to avoid the confession. 'What line?' said Mrs. Burgoyne.

'It's Milton. I learnt it at school. You will know it, of course,' she said timidly. 'It's the line about "the triple tyrant" and "the Babylonian woe"'—

Mrs. Burgoyne laughed.

'Their martyred blood and ashes sow
O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway
The triple tyrant—

Was that what you were thinking of?'

Miss Foster had coloured deeply.

'It was the cap—the tiara, isn't it?—that reminded me,' she said faintly; and then she looked away, as though not wishing to continue the subject.

'She wonders whether I am a Catholic,' thought Mrs. Burgoyne, amused, 'and whether she has hurt my feelings.'—Aloud, she said—'Are you very, very Puritan still in your part of America? Excuse me, but I am dreadfully ignorant about America.'

'We are Methodists in our little town mostly'—said Miss Foster. 'There is a Presbyterian church—and the best families go there. But my father's people were always Methodists. My mother was a Universalist.'

Mrs. Burgoyne frowned with perplexity. 'I'm afraid I don't know what that is?' she said.

'They think everybody will be saved,' said Miss Foster in her shy deep voice. 'They don't despair of anybody.'

And suddenly Mrs. Burgoyne saw a very soft and tender expression pass across the girl's grave features, like the rising of an inward light.

'A mystic—and a beauty both?' she thought to herself, a little scornfully this time. In all her politeness to the new-comer so far, she had been like a person stealthily searching for something foreseen and desired. If she had found it, it would have been quite easy to go on being kind to Miss Foster. But she had not found it.

At that moment the door between the library and the salon was thrown open, and Manisty appeared, cigarette in hand.

'Aunt Pattie—Eleanor—how many tickets do you want for this function next
Sunday?'

'Four tribune tickets—we three'—Miss Manisty pointed to the other two ladies—'and yourself. If we can't get so many, leave me at home.'

'Of course we shall have tribune tickets—as many as we want,' said Manisty a little impatiently.—'Have you explained to Miss Foster?'

'No, but I will. Miss Foster, next Sunday fortnight the Pope celebrates his 'Capella Papale'—the eighteenth anniversary of his coronation—in St. Peter's. Rome is very full, and there will be a great demonstration—fifty thousand people or more. Would you like to come?'

Miss Foster looked up, hesitating. Manisty, who had turned to go back to his room, paused, struck by the momentary silence. He listened with curiosity for the girl's reply.

'One just goes to see it like a spectacle?' she said at last, slowly. 'One needn't do anything oneself?'

Miss Manisty stared—and then laughed. 'Nobody will see what you do in such a crowd—I should think,' she said. 'But you know one can't be rude—to an old old man. If others kneel, I suppose we must kneel. Does it do anyone harm to be blessed by an old man?'

'Oh no!—no!' cried Miss Foster, flushing deeply. Then, after a moment, she added decidedly—'Please—I should like to go very much.'

Manisty grinned unseen, and closed the door behind him.

Then Miss Foster, after an instant's restlessness, moved nearer to her hostess.

'I am afraid—you thought I was rude just now? It's so lovely of you to plan things for me. But—I can't ever be sure whether it's right to go into other people's churches and look at their services—like a show. I should just hate it myself—and I felt it once or twice at Florence. And so—you understand—don't you?'—she said imploringly.

Miss Manisty's small eyes examined her with anxiety. 'What an extraordinary girl!' she thought. 'Is she going to be a great bore?'

At the same time the girl's look—so open, sweet and modest—disarmed and attracted her. She shrugged her shoulders with a smile.

'Well, my dear—I don't know. All I can say is, the Catholics don't mind! They walk in and out of their own churches all the time mass is going on—the children run about—the sacristans take you round. You certainly needn't feel it on their account.'

'But then, too, if I am not a Catholic—how far ought one to be taking part—in—in what—'

'In what one disapproves?' said Mrs. Burgoyne, smiling. 'You would make the world a little difficult, wouldn't you, if you were to arrange it on that principle?'

She spoke in a dry, rather sharp voice, unlike that in which she had hitherto addressed the new-comer. Lucy Foster looked at her with a shrinking perplexity.

'It's best if we're all straightforward, isn't it?'—she said in a low voice, and then, drawing towards her an illustrated magazine that lay on the table near her she hurriedly buried herself in its pages.

* * * * *

Silence had fallen on the three ladies. Eleanor Burgoyne sat lost in reverie, her fair head thrown back against her low chair.

She was thinking of her conversation with Edward Manisty on the balcony—and of his book. That book indeed had for her a deep personal significance. To think of it at all, was to be carried to the past, to feel for the hundredth time the thrill of change and new birth.

When she joined them in Rome, in mid-winter, she had found Manisty struggling with the first drafts of it,—full of yeasty ideas, full also of doubts, confusions and discouragements. He had not been at all glad to see his half-forgotten cousin—quite the contrary. As she had reminded him, she had suffered much the same things at his hands that Miss Foster was likely to suffer now. It made her laugh to think of his languid reception of her, the moods, the silences, the weeks of just civil acquaintanceship; and then gradually, the snatches of talk—and those great black brows of his lifted in a surprise which a tardy politeness would try to mask:—and at last, the good, long, brain-filling, heart-filling talks, the break-down of reserves—the man's whole mind, its remorses, ambitions, misgivings, poured at her feet—ending in the growth of that sweet daily habit of common work—side by side, head close to head—hand close to hand.—

Eleanor Burgoyne lay still and motionless in the soft dusk of the old room, her white lids shut—Lucy Foster thought her asleep.—

He had said to her once, quoting some Frenchman, that she was 'good to consult about ideas.' Ah well!—at a great price had she won that praise. And with an unconscious stiffening of the frail hands lying on the arms of the chair, she thought of those bygone hours in which she had asked herself—'what remains?' Religious faith?—No!—Life was too horrible! Could such things have happened to her in a world ruled by a God?—that was her question, day and night for years. But books, facts, ideas—all the riddle of this various nature—that one might still amuse oneself with a little, till one's own light went out in the same darkness that had already engulfed mother—husband—child.

So that 'cleverness,' of which father and husband had taken so little account, which had been of so little profit to her so far in her course through circumstance, had come to her aid. The names and lists of the books that had passed through her hands, during those silent years of her widowhood, lived beside her stern old father, would astonish even Manisty were she to try and give some account of them. And first she had read merely to fill the hours, to dull memory. But gradually there had sprung up in her that inner sweetness, that gentle restoring flame that comes from the life of ideas, the life of knowledge, even as a poor untrained woman may approach it. She had shared it with no one, revealed it to no one. Her nature dreaded rebuffs; and her father had no words sharp enough for any feminine ambition beyond the household and the nursery.

So she had kept it all to herself, till Miss Manisty, shocked as many other people had begun to be by her fragile looks, had bearded the General, and carried her off to Rome for the winter. And there she had been forced, as it were, into this daily contact with Edward Manisty, at what might well turn out to be the most critical moment of his life; when he was divided between fierce regrets for the immediate past, and fierce resolves to recover and assert himself in other ways; when he was taking up again his earlier function of man of letters in order to vindicate himself as a politician and a man of action. Strange and challenging personality!—did she yet know it fully?

Ah! that winter—what a healing in it all!—what a great human experience! Yet now, as always, when her thoughts turned to the past, she did not allow them to dwell upon it long. That past lay for her in a golden haze. To explore it too deeply, or too long,—that she shrank from. All that she prayed was to press no questions, force no issues. But at least she had found in it a new reason for living; she meant to live; whereas last year she had wished to die, and all the world—dear, kind Aunt Pattie first and foremost—had thought her on the road for death.

But the book?—she bent her brows over it, wrestling with various doubts and difficulties. Though it was supposed to represent the thoughts and fancies of an Englishman wandering through modern Italy, it was really Manisty's Apologia—Manisty's defence of certain acts which had made him for a time the scandal and offence of the English political party to which ancestrally he belonged, in whose interests he had entered Parliament and taken office. He had broken with his party on the ground that it had become a party of revolution, especially in matters connected with Religion and Education; and having come abroad to escape for a time from the personal frictions and agitations which his conduct had brought upon him, he had thrown himself into a passionate and most hostile study of Italy—Italy, the new country, made by revolution, fashioned, so far as laws and government can do it, by the lay modern spirit—as an object-lesson to England and the world. The book was in reality a party pamphlet, written by a man whose history and antecedents, independently of his literary ability, made his work certain of readers and of vogue.

That, however, was not what Mrs. Burgoyne was thinking of.—She was anxiously debating with herself certain points of detail, points of form.

These fragments of poetical prose which Manisty had interspersed amid a serious political argument—were they really an adornment of the book, or a blur upon it? He had a natural tendency towards colour and exuberance in writing; he loved to be leisurely, and a little sonorous; there was something old-fashioned and Byronic in his style and taste. His sentences, perhaps, were short; but his manner was not brief. The elliptical fashion of the day was not his. He liked to wander through his subject, dreaming, poetising, discussing at his will. It was like a return to vetturino after the summary haste of the railway. And so far the public had welcomed this manner of his. His earlier book (the 'Letters from Palestine'), with its warm, over-laden pages, had found many readers and much fame.

But here—in a strenuous political study, furnished with all the facts and figures that the student and the debater require—representing, too, another side of the man, just as vigorous and as real, were these intrusions of poetry wise or desirable? Were they in place? Was the note of them quite right? Was it not a little turbid—uncertain?

That prose poem of 'The Priest of Nemi,' for example?

Ah! Nemi!—the mere thought of it sent a thrill of pleasure through her. That blue lake in its green cup on the edge of the Campagna, with its ruins and its legends—what golden hours had she and Manisty spent there! It had caught their fancy from the beginning—the site of the great temple, the wild strawberry fields, the great cliffs of Nemi and Genzano, the bright-faced dark-eyed peasants with their classical names—Aristodemo, Oreste, Evandro.

And that strange legend of the murdered priest—

'The priest who slew the slayer,
And shall himself be slain'—

—what modern could not find something in that—some stimulus to fancy—some hint for dreaming?

Yes—it had been very natural—very tempting. But!—

… So she pondered,—a number of acute, critical instincts coming into play. And presently her thoughts spread and became a vague reverie, covering a multitude of ideas and images that she and Manisty now had in common. How strange that she and he should be engaged in this work together!—this impassioned defence of tradition, of Catholicism and the Papacy, as the imperishable, indestructible things—'chastened and not killed—dying, and behold they live'—let the puny sons of modern Italy rage and struggle as they may. He—one of the most thorough sceptics of his day, as she had good reason to know—she, a woman who had at one time ceased to believe because of an intolerable anguish, and was now only creeping slowly back to faith, to hope, because—because—

Ah!—with a little shiver, she recalled her thought, as a falconer might his bird, before it struck. Oh! this old, old Europe, with its complexities, its manifold currents and impulses, every human being an embodied contradiction—no simplicity, no wholeness anywhere—none possible!

She opened her eyes languidly, and they rested on Lucy Foster's head and profile bent over her book. Mrs. Burgoyne's mind filled with a sudden amused pity for the girl's rawness and ignorance. She seemed the fitting type of a young crude race with all its lessons to learn; that saw nothing absurd in its Methodists and Universalists and the rest—confident, as a child is, in its cries and whims and prejudices. The American girl, fresh from her wilds, and doubtful whether she would go to see the Pope in St. Peter's, lest she should have to bow the knee to Antichrist—the image delighted the mind of the elder woman. She played with it, finding fresh mock at every turn.

* * * * *

'Eleanor!—now I have rewritten it. Tell me how it runs.'

Lucy Poster looked up. She saw that Mr. Manisty, carrying a sheaf of papers in his hand, had thrown himself into a chair behind Mrs. Burgoyne. His look was strenuous and absorbed, his tumbling black hair had fallen forward as though in a stress of composition; he spoke in a low, imperative voice, like one accustomed to command the time and the attention of those about him.

'Read!' said Mrs. Burgoyne, turning her slender neck that she might look at him and hear. He began to read at once in a deep, tremulous voice, and as though he were quite unconscious of any other presence in the room than hers. Miss Foster, who was sitting at a little distance, supposed she ought not to listen. She was about to close her book and rise, when Miss Manisty touched her on the arm.

'It disturbs him if we move about!' said the little spinster in a smiling whisper, her finger on her lip. And suddenly the girl was conscious of a lightning flash from lifted eyes—a look threatening and peremptory. She settled herself into her chair again as quietly as possible, and sat with head bent, a smile she could not repress playing round her lips. It was all she could do indeed not to laugh, so startling and passionate had been the monition conveyed in Mr. Manisty's signal. That the great man should take little notice of his aunt's guest was natural enough. But to be frowned upon the first evening, as though she were a troublesome child!—she did not resent it at all, but it tickled her sense of humour. She thought happily of her next letter to Uncle Ben; how she would describe these rather strange people.

And at first she hardly listened to what was being read. The voice displeased her. It was too emphatic—she disliked its tremolo, its deep bass vibrations. Surely one should read more simply!

Then the first impression passed away altogether. She looked up—her eyes fastened themselves on the reader—her lips parted—the smile changed.

* * * * *

What the full over-rich voice was calling up before her was a little morning scene, as Virgil might have described it, passing in the hut of a Latian peasant farmer, under Tiberius.

It opened with the waking at dawn of the herdsman Cæculus and his little son, in their round thatched cottage on the ridge of Aricia, beneath the Alban Mount. It showed the countryman stepping out of his bed into the darkness, groping for the embers on the hearth, re-lighting his lamp, and calling first to his boy asleep on his bed of leaves, then to their African servant, the negro slave-girl with her wide mouth, her tight woolly hair. One by one the rustic facts emerged, so old, so ever new:—Cæculus grinding his corn, and singing at his work—the baking of the flat wheaten cakes on the hot embers—the gathering of herbs from the garden—the kneading them with a little cheese and oil to make a relish for the day—the harnessing of the white steers under the thonged yoke—the man going forth to his ploughing, under the mounting dawn, clad in his goatskin tunic and his leathern hat,—the boy loosening the goats from their pen beside the hut, and sleepily driving them past the furrows where his father was at work, to the misty woods beyond.

With every touch, the earlier world revived, grew plainer in the sun, till the listener found herself walking with Manisty through paths that cut the Alban Hills in the days of Rome's first imperial glory, listening to his tale of the little goatherd, and of Nemi.

* * * * *

'So the boy—Quintus—left the ploughed lands, and climbed a hill above the sleeping town. And when he reached the summit, he paused and turned him to the west.

'The Latian plain spreads beneath him in the climbing sun; at its edge is the sea in a light of pearl; the white fishing-boats sparkle along the shore. Close at his feet runs a straight road high upon the hill. He can see the country folk on their laden mules and donkeys journeying along it, journeying northwards to the city in the plain that the spurs of the mountain hide from him. His fancy goes with them, along the Appian Way, trotting with the mules. When will his father take him again to Rome to see the shops, and the Forum, and the new white temples, and Cæsar's great palace on the hill?

'Then carelessly his eyes pass southward, and there beneath him in its hollow is the lake—the round blue lake that Diana loves, where are her temple and her shadowy grove. The morning mists lie wreathed above it; the just-leafing trees stand close in the great cup; only a few patches of roof and column reveal the shrine.

'On he moves. His wheaten cake is done. He takes his pipe from his girdle, touches it, and sings.

'His bare feet as he moves tread down the wet flowers. Round him throng the goats; suddenly he throws down his pipe; he runs to a goat heavy with milk; he presses the teats with his quick hands; the milk flows foaming into the wooden cup he has placed below; he drinks, his brown curls sweeping the cup; then he picks up his pipe and walks on proudly before his goats, his lithe body swaying from side to side as he moves, dancing to the music that he makes. The notes float up into the morning air; the echo of them runs round the shadowy hollow of the lake.

'Down trips the boy, parting the dewy branches with his brown shoulders. Around him the mountain side is golden with the broom; at his feet the white cistus covers the rock. The shrubs of the scattered wood send out their scents; and the goats browse upon their shoots.

'But the path sinks gently downward—winding along the basin of the lake.
And now the boy emerges from the wood; he stands upon a knoll to rest.

'Ah! sudden and fierce comes the sun!—and there below him in the rich hollow it strikes the temple—Diana's temple and her grove. Out flame the white columns, the bronze roof, the white enclosing walls. Piercingly white the holy and famous place shines among the olives and the fallows; the sun burns upon the marble; Phoebus salutes his great sister. And in the waters of the lake reappear the white columns; the blue waves dance around the shimmering lines; the mists part above them; they rise from the lake, lingering awhile upon the woods.

'The boy lays his hands to his eyes and looks eagerly towards the temple.
Nothing. No living creature stirs.

'Often has he been warned by his father not to venture alone within the grove of the goddess. Twice, indeed, on the great June festivals has he witnessed the solemn sacrifices, and the crowds of worshippers, and the torches mirrored in the lake. But without his father, fear has hitherto stayed his steps far from the temple.

'To-day, however, as the sun mounts, and the fresh breeze breaks from the sea, his youth and the wildness of it dance within his blood. He and his goats pass into an olive garden. The red-brown earth has been freshly turned amid the twisted trunks; the goats scatter, searching for the patches of daisied grass still left by the plough. Guiltily the boy looks round him—peers through the olives and their silvery foam of leaves, as they fall past him down the steep. Then like one of his own kids he lowers his head and runs; he leaves his flock under the olives; he slips into a dense ilex-wood, still chill with the morning; he presses towards its edge; panting he climbs a huge and ancient tree that flings its boughs forward above the temple wall; he creeps along a branch among the thick small leaves,—he lifts his head.

'The temple is before him, and the sacred grove. He sees the great terrace, stretching to the lake; he hears the little waves plashing on its buttressed wall.

'Close beneath him, towards the rising and the midday sun there stretches a great niched wall girdling the temple on two sides, each niche a shrine, and in each shrine a cold white form that waits the sun—Apollo the Far-Darter, and the spear-bearing Pallas, and among them that golden Cæsar, of whom the country talks, who has given great gifts to the temple—he and his grandson, the young Gaius.

'The boy strains his eye to see, and as the light strikes into the niche, flames on the gleaming breastplate, and the uplifted hand, he trembles on his branch for fear. Hurriedly he turns his look on the dwellings of the priestesses, where all still sleeps; on the rows of shining pillars that stand round about the temple; on the close-set trees of the grove that stands between it and the lake.

'Hark!—a clanging of metal—of great doors upon their hinges. From the inner temple—from the shrine of the goddess, there comes a man. His head is bound with the priest's fillet; sharply the sun touches his white pointed cap; in his hand he carries a sword.

'Between the temple and the grove there is a space of dazzling light. The man passes into it, turns himself to the east, and raises his hand to his mouth; drawing his robe over his head, he sinks upon the ground, and prostrate there, adores the coming god.

'His prayer lasts but an instant. Rising in haste, he stands looking around him, his sword gathered in his hand. He is a man still young; his stature is more than the ordinary height of men; his limbs are strong and supple. His rich dress, moreover, shows him to be both priest and king. But again the boy among his leaves draws his trembling body close, hiding, like a lizard, when some passing step has startled it from the sun. For on this haggard face the gods have written strange and terrible things; the priest's eyes deep sunk under his shaggy hair dart from side to side in a horrible unrest; he seems a creature separate from his kind—possessed of evil—dedicate to fear.

'In the midst of the temple grove stands one vast ilex,—the tree of trees, sacred to Trivia. The other trees fall back from it in homage; and round it paces the priest, alone in the morning light.

'But his is no holy meditation. His head is thrown back; his ear listens for every sound; the bared sword glitters as he moves …

'There is a rustle among the further trees. Quickly the boy stretches his brown neck; for at the sound the priest crouches on himself; he throws the robe from his right arm; and so waits, ready to strike. The light falls on his pale features, the torment of his brow, the anguish of his drawn lips. Beside the lapping lake, and under the golden morning, he stands as Terror in the midst of Peace.

'Silence again:—only the questing birds call from the olive-woods. Panting, the priest moves onward, racked with sick tremors, prescient of doom.

'But hark! a cry!—and yet another answering—a dark form bursting from the grove—a fierce locked struggle under the sacred tree. The boy crawls to the furthest end of the branch, his eyes starting from his head.

'From the temple enclosure, from the further trees, from the hill around, a crowd comes running; men and white-robed priestesses, women, children even—gathering in haste. But they pause afar off. Not a living soul approaches the place of combat; not a hand gives aid. The boy can see the faces of the virgins who serve the temple. They are pale, but very still. Not a sound of pity escapes their white lips; their ambiguous eyes watch calmly for the issue of the strife.

'And on the further side, at the edge of the grove stand country folk, men in goatskin tunics and leathern hats like the boy's father. And the little goatherd, not knowing what he does, calls to them for help in his shrill voice. But no one heeds; and the priest himself calls no one, entreats no one.

'Ah! The priest wavers—he falls—his white robes are in the dust. The bright steel rises—descends:—the last groan speeds to heaven.

* * * * *

'The victor raised himself from the dead, all stained with the blood and soil of the battle. Quintus gazed upon him astonished. For here was no rude soldier, nor swollen boxer, but a youth merely—a youth, slender and beautiful, fair-haired, and of a fair complexion. His loins were girt with a slave's tunic. Pallid were his young features; his limbs wasted with hunger and toil; his eyes blood-streaked as those of the deer when the dogs close upon its tender life.

'And looking down upon the huddled priest, fallen in his blood upon the dust, he peered long into the dead face, as though he beheld it for the first time. Shudders ran through him; Quintus listened to hear him weep or moan. But at the last, he lifted his head, fiercely straightening his limbs like one who reminds himself of black fate, and things not to be undone. And turning to the multitude, he made a sign. With shouting and wild cries they came upon him; they snatched the purple-striped robe from the murdered priest, and with it they clothed his murderer. They put on him the priest's fillet, and the priest's cap; they hung garlands upon his neck; and with rejoicing and obeisance they led him to the sacred temple….

'And for many hours more the boy remained hidden in the tree, held there by the spell of his terror. He saw the temple ministers take up the body of the dead, and carelessly drag it from the grove. All day long was there crowd and festival within the sacred precinct. But when the shadows began to fall from the ridge of Aricia across the lake; when the new-made priest had offered on Trivia's altar a white steer, nourished on the Alban grass; when he had fed the fire of Vesta; and poured offerings to Virbius the immortal, whom in ancient days great Diana had snatched from the gods' wrath, and hidden here, safe within the Arician wood,—when these were done, the crowd departed and the Grove-King came forth alone from the temple.

'The boy watched what he would do. In his hand he carried the sword, which at the sunrise he had taken from the dead. And he came to the sacred tree that was in the middle of the grove, and he too began to pace about it, glancing from side to side, as that other had done before him. And once when he was near the place where the caked blood still lay upon the ground, the sword fell clashing from his hand, and he flung his two arms to heaven with a hoarse and piercing cry—the cry of him who accuses and arraigns the gods.

'And the boy, shivering, slipped from the tree, with that cry in his ear, and hastily sought for his goats. And when he had found them he drove them home, not staying even to quench his thirst from their swollen udders. And in the shepherd's hut he found his father Cæculus; and sinking down beside him with tears and sobs he told his tale.

'And Cæculus pondered long. And without chiding, he laid his hand upon the boy's head and bade him be comforted. "For," said he, as though he spake with himself—"such is the will of the goddess. And from the furthest times it has happened thus, before the Roman fathers journeyed from the Alban Mount and made them dwellings on the seven hills—before Romulus gave laws,—or any white-robed priest had climbed the Capitol. From blood springs up the sacred office; and to blood it goes! No natural death must waste the priest of Trivia's tree. The earth is hungry for the blood in its strength—nor shall it be withheld! Thus only do the trees bear, and the fields bring forth."

'Astonished, the boy looked at his father, and saw upon his face, as he turned it upon the ploughed lands and the vineyards, a secret and a savage joy. And the little goatherd's mind was filled with terror—nor would his father tell him further what the mystery meant. But when he went to his bed of dried leaves at night, and the moon rose upon the lake, and the great woods murmured in the hollow far beneath him, he tossed restlessly from side to side, thinking of the new priest who kept watch there—of his young limbs and miserable eyes—of that voice which he had flung to heaven. And the child tried to believe that he might yet escape.—But already in his dreams he saw the grove part once more and the slayer leap forth. He saw the watching crowd—and their fierce, steady eyes, waiting thirstily for the spilt blood. And it was as though a mighty hand crushed the boy's heart, and for the first time he shrank from the gods, and from his father,—so that the joy of his youth was darkened within him.'

* * * * *

As he read the last word, Manisty flung the sheets down upon the table beside him, and rising, he began to pace the room with his hands upon his sides, frowning and downcast. When he came to Mrs. Burgoyne's chair he paused beside her—

'I don't see what it has to do with the book. It is time lost'—he said to her abruptly, almost angrily.

'I think not,' she said, smiling at him. But her tone wavered a little, and his look grew still more irritable.

'I shall destroy it!'—he said, with energy—'nothing more intolerable than ornament out of place!'

'Oh don't!—don't alter it at all!' said a quick imploring voice.

Manisty turned in astonishment.

Lucy Foster was looking at him steadily. A glow of pleasure was on her cheek, her beautiful eyes were warm and eager. Manisty for the first time observed her, took note also of the loosened hair and Eleanor's cloak.

'You liked it?' he said with some embarrassment. He had entirely forgotten that she was in the room.

She drew a long breath.

'Yes!'—she said softly, looking down.

He thought that she was too shy to express herself. In reality her feeling was divided between her old enthusiasm and her new disillusion. She would have liked to tell him that his reading had reminded her of the book she loved. But the man, standing beside her, chilled her. She wished she had not spoken. It began to seem to her a piece of forwardness.

'Well, you're very kind'—he said, rather formally—'But I'm afraid it won't do. That lady there won't pass it.'

'What have I said?'—cried Mrs. Burgoyne, protesting.

Manisty laughed. 'Nothing. But you'll agree with me.' Then he gathered up his papers under his arm in a ruthless confusion, and walked away into his study, leaving discomfort behind him.

Mrs. Burgoyne sat silent, a little tired and pale. She too would have liked to praise and to give pleasure. It was not wonderful indeed that the child's fancy had been touched. That thrilling, passionate voice—her own difficulty always was to resist it—to try and see straight in spite of it.

* * * * *

Later that evening, when Miss Foster had withdrawn, Manisty and Mrs. Burgoyne were lingering and talking on a stone balcony that ran along the eastern front of the villa. The Campagna and the sea were behind them. Here, beyond a stretch of formal garden, rose a curved front of wall with statues and plashing water showing dimly in the moonlight; and beyond the wall there was a space of blue and silver lake; and girdling the lake the forest-covered Monte Cavo rose towering into the moonlit sky, just showing on its topmost peak that white speck which once was the temple of the Latian Jupiter, and is now, alas! only the monument of an Englishman's crime against history, art, and Rome. The air was soft, and perfumed with scent from the roses in the side-alleys below. A monotonous bird-note came from the ilex darkness, like the note of a thin passing bell. It was the cry of a small owl, which, in its plaintiveness and changelessness, had often seemed to Manisty and Eleanor the very voice of the Roman night.

Suddenly Mrs. Burgoyne said—'I have a different version of your Nemi story running in my head!—more tragic than yours. My priest is no murderer. He found his predecessor dead under the tree; the place was empty; he took it. He won't escape his own doom, of course, but he has not deserved it. There is no blood on his hand—his heart is pure. There!—I imagine it so.'

There was a curious tremor in her voice, which Manisty, lost in his own thoughts, did not detect. He smiled.

'Well!—you'll compete with Renan. He made a satire out of it. His priest is a moral gentleman who won't kill anybody. But the populace soon settle that. They knock him on the head, as a disturber of religion.'

'I had forgotten—' said Mrs. Burgoyne absently.

'But you didn't like it, Eleanor—my little piece!' said Manisty, after a pause. 'So don't pretend!'

She roused herself at once, and began to talk with her usual eagerness and sympathy. It was a repetition of the scene before dinner. Only this time her effect was not so great. Manisty's depression did not yield.

Presently, however, he looked down upon her. In the kind, concealing moonlight she was all grace and charm. The man's easy tenderness awoke.

'Eleanor—this air is too keen for that thin dress.'

And stooping over her he took her cloak from her arm, and wrapped it about her.

'You lent it to Miss Foster'—he said, surveying her. 'It became her—but it knows its mistress!'

The colour mounted an instant in her cheek. Then she moved further away from him.

'Have you discovered yet'—she said—'that that girl is extraordinarily handsome?'

'Oh yes'—he said carelessly—'with a handsomeness that doesn't matter.'

She laughed.

'Wait till Aunt Pattie and I have dressed her and put her to rights.'

'Well, you can do most things no doubt—both with bad books, and raw girls,'—he said, with a shrug and a sigh.

They bade each other good-night, and Mrs. Burgoyne disappeared through the glass door behind them.

* * * * *

The moon was sailing gloriously above the stone-pines of the garden. Mrs. Burgoyne, half-undressed, sat dreaming in a corner room, with a high painted ceiling, and both its windows open to the night.

She had entered her room in a glow of something which had been half torment, half happiness. Now, after an hour's dreaming, she suddenly bent forward and, parting the cloud of fair hair that fell about her, she looked in the glass before her, at the worn, delicate face haloed within it—thinking all the time with a vague misery of Lucy Foster's untouched bloom.

Then her eyes fell upon two photographs that stood upon her table. One represented a man in yeomanry uniform; the other a tottering child of two.

'Oh! my boy—my darling!'—she cried in a stifled agony, and snatching up the picture, she bowed her head upon it, kissing it. The touch of it calmed her. But she could not part from it. She put it in her breast, and when she slept, it was still there.

CHAPTER III

'Eleanor—where are you off to?'

'Just to my house of Simmon,' said that lady, smiling. She was standing on the eastern balcony, buttoning a dainty grey glove, while Manisty a few paces from her was lounging in a deck-chair, with the English newspapers.

'What?—to mass? I protest. Look at the lake—look at the sky—look at that patch of broom on the lake side. Come and walk there before déjeuner—and make a round home by Aricia.'

Mrs. Burgoyne shook her head.

'No—I like my little idolatries,' she said, with decision. It was Sunday morning. The bells in Marinata were ringing merrily. Women and girls with black lace scarves upon their heads, handsome young men in short coats and soft peaked hats, were passing along the road between the villa and the lake, on their way to mass. It was a warm April day. The clouds of yellow banksia, hanging over the statued wall that girdled the fountain-basin, were breaking into bloom; and the nightingales were singing with a prodigality that was hardly worthy of their rank and dignity. Nature in truth is too lavish of nightingales on the Alban Hills in spring! She forgets, as it were, her own sweet arts, and all that rareness adds to beauty. One may hear a nightingale and not mark him; which is a lèse majesté.

Mrs. Burgoyne's toilette matched the morning. The grey dress, so fresh and elegant, the broad black hat above the fair hair, the violets dewy from the garden that were fastened at her slender waist, and again at her throat beneath the pallor of the face,—these things were of a perfection quite evident to the critical sense of Edward Manisty. It was the perfection that was characteristic. So too was the faded fairness of hair and skin, the frail distinguished look. So, above all, was the contrast between the minute care for personal adornment implied in the finish of the dress, and the melancholy shrinking of the dark-rimmed eyes.

He watched her, through the smoke wreaths of his cigarette,—pleasantly and lazily conscious both of her charm and her inconsistencies.

'Are you going to take Miss Foster?' he asked her.

Mrs. Burgoyne laughed.

'I made the suggestion. She looked at me with amazement, coloured crimson, and went away. I have lost all my chances with her.'

'Then she must be an ungrateful minx'—said Manisty, lowering his voice and looking round him towards the villa, 'considering the pains you take.'

'Some of us must take pains,' said Mrs. Burgoyne, significantly.

'Some of us do'—he said, laughing. 'The others profit.—One goes on praying for the primitive,—but when it comes—No!—it is not permitted to be as typical as Miss Foster.'

'Typical of what?'

'The dissidence of Dissent, apparently—and the Protestantism of the
Protestant religion. Confess:—it was an odd caprice on the part of high
Jove to send her here?'

'I am sure she has a noble character—and an excellent intelligence!'

Manisty shrugged his shoulders.

'—Her grandfather'—continued the lady—'was a divinity professor and wrote a book on the Inquisition!'—

Manisty repeated his gesture.

'—And as I told you last night, she is almost as handsome as your Greek head—and very like her.'

'My dear lady—you have the wildest notions!'

Mrs. Burgoyne picked up her parasol.

'Quite true.—Your aunt tells me she was so disappointed, poor child, that there was no church of her own sort for her to go to this morning.'

'What!'—cried Manisty—'Did she expect a conventicle in the Pope's own town!'

For Marinata owned a Papal villa and had once been a favourite summer residence of the Popes.

'No—but she thought she might have gone into Rome, and she missed the trains. I found her wandering about the salon looking quite starved and restless.'

'Those are hungers that pass!—My heart is hard.—There—your bell is stopping. Eleanor!—I wonder why you go to these functions?'

He turned to look at her, his fine eye sharp and a little mocking.

'Because I like it.'

'You like the thought of it. But when you get there, the reality won't please you at all. There will be the dirty floor, and the bad music,—and the little priest intoning through his nose—and the scuffling boys,—and the abominable pictures—and the tawdry altars. Much better stay at home—and help me praise the Holy Roman Church from a safe distance!'

'What a hypocrite people would think you, if they could hear you talk like that!' she said, flushing.

'Then they would think it unjustly.—I don't mean to be my own dupe, that's all.'

'The dupes are the happiest,' she said in a low voice. 'There is something between them, and—Ah! well, never mind!'—

She stood still a moment, looking across the lake, her hands resting lightly on the stone balustrade of the terrace. Manisty watched her in silence, occasionally puffing at his cigarette.

'Well, I shall be back very soon,' she said, gathering up her prayer-book and her parasol. 'Will it then be our duty to take Miss Foster for a walk?'

'Why not leave her to my aunt?'

She passed him with a little nod of farewell. Presently, through the openings of the balustrade, Manisty could watch her climbing the village street with her dress held high above her daintily shod feet, a crowd of children asking for a halfpenny following at her heels. Presently he saw her stop irresolutely, open a little velvet bag that hung from her waist and throw a shower of soldi among the children. They swooped upon it, fighting and shrieking.

Mrs. Burgoyne looked at them half smiling, half repentant, shook her head and walked on.

'Eleanor—you coward!' said Manisty, throwing himself back in his chair with a silent laugh.

Under his protection, or his aunt's, as he knew well, Mrs. Burgoyne could walk past those little pests of children, even the poor armless and legless horrors on the way to Albano, and give a firm adhesion to Miss Manisty's Scotch doctrines on the subject of begging. But by herself, she could not refuse—she could not bear to be scowled on—even for a moment. She must yield—must give herself the luxury of being liked. It was all of a piece with her weakness towards servants and porters and cabmen—her absurdities in the way of tips and gifts—the kindnesses she had been showing during the last three days to the American girl. Too kind! Insipidity lay that way.

Manisty returned to his newspapers. When he had finished them he got up and began to pace the stone terrace, his great head bent forward as usual, as though the weight of it were too much for the shoulders. The newspapers had made him restless again, had dissipated the good humour of the morning, born perhaps of the mere April warmth and bien être.

'Idling in a villa—with two women'—he said to himself, bitterly—'while all these things are happening.'

For the papers were full of news—of battles lost and won, on questions with which he had been at one time intimately concerned. Once or twice in the course of these many columns he had found his own name, his own opinion quoted, but only as belonging to a man who had left the field—a man of the past—politically dead.

As he stood there with his hands upon his sides, looking out over the Alban Lake, and its broom-clad sides, a great hunger for London swept suddenly upon him, for the hot scent of its streets, for its English crowd, for the look of its shops and clubs and parks. He had a vision of the club writing-room—of well-known men coming in and going out—discussing the news of the morning, the gossip of the House—he saw himself accosted as one of the inner circle,—he was sensible again of those short-lived pleasures of power and office. Not that he had cared half as much for these pleasures, when he had them, as other men. To affirm with him meant to be already half way on the road to doubt; contradiction was his character. Nevertheless, now that he was out of it, alone and forgotten—now that the game was well beyond his reach—it had a way of appearing to him at moments intolerably attractive!

Nothing before him now, in these long days at the villa, but the hours of work with Eleanor, the walks with Eleanor, the meals with his aunt and Eleanor—and now, for a stimulating change, Miss Foster! The male in him was restless. He had been eager to come to the villa, and the quiet of the hills, so as to push this long delaying book to its final end. And, behold, day by day, in the absence of the talk and distractions of Rome, a thousand discontents and misgivings were creeping upon him. In Rome he was still a power. In spite of his strange detached position, it was known that he was the defender of the Roman system, the panegyrist of Leo XIII., the apologist of the Papal position in Italy. And this had been more than enough to open to him all but the very inmost heart of Catholic life. Their apartments in Rome, to the scandal of Miss Manisty's Scotch instincts, had been haunted by ecclesiastics of every rank and kind. Cardinals, Italian and foreign, had taken their afternoon tea from Mrs. Burgoyne's hands; the black and white of the Dominicans, the brown of the Franciscans, the black of the Jesuits,—the staircase in the Via Sistina had been well acquainted with them all. Information not usually available had been placed lavishly at Manisty's disposal; he had felt the stir and thrill of the great Catholic organisation as all its nerve-threads gather to its brain and centre in the Vatican. Nay, on two occasions, he had conversed freely with Leo XIII. himself.

All this he had put aside, impatiently, that he might hurry on his book, and accomplish his coup. And in the tranquillity of the hills, was he beginning to lose faith in the book, and the compensation it was to bring him? Unless this book, with its scathing analysis of the dangers and difficulties of the secularist State, were not only a book, but an event, of what use would it be to him? He was capable both of extravagant conceit, and of the most boundless temporary disgust with his own doings and ideas. Such a disgust seemed to be mounting now through all his veins, taking all the savour out of life and work. No doubt it would be the same to the end,—the politician in him just strong enough to ruin the man of letters—the man of letters always ready to distract and paralyse the politician. And as for the book, there also he had been the victim of a double mind. He had endeavoured to make it popular, as Chateaubriand made the great argument of the Génie du Christianisme popular, by the introduction of an element of poetry and romance. For the moment he was totally out of love with the result. What was the plain man to make of it? And nowadays the plain man settles everything.

Well!—if the book came to grief, it was not only he that would suffer.—Poor Eleanor!—poor, kind, devoted Eleanor!

Yet as the thought of her passed through his meditations, a certain annoyance mingled with it. What if she had been helping to keep him, all this time, in a fool's paradise—hiding the truth from him by this soft enveloping sympathy of hers?

His mind started these questions freely. Yet only to brush them away with a sense of shame. Beneath his outer controlling egotism there were large and generous elements in his mixed nature. And nothing could stand finally against the memory of that sweet all-sacrificing devotion which had been lavished upon himself and his work all the winter!

What right had he to accept it? What did it mean? Where was it leading?

He guessed pretty shrewdly what had been the speculations of the friends and acquaintances who had seen them together in Rome. Eleanor Burgoyne was but just thirty, very attractive, and his distant kinswoman. As for himself, he knew very well that according to the general opinion of the world, beginning with his aunt, it was his duty to marry and marry soon. He was in the prime of life; he had a property that cried out for an heir; and a rambling Georgian house that would be the better for a mistress. He was tolerably sure that Aunt Pattie had already had glimpses of Eleanor Burgoyne in that position.

Well—if so, Aunt Pattie was less shrewd than usual. Marriage! The notion of its fetters and burdens was no less odious to him now than it had been at twenty. What did he want with a wife—still more, with a son? The thought of his own life continued in another's filled him with a shock of repulsion. Where was the sense of infusing into another being the black drop of discontent that poisoned his own? A daughter perhaps—with the eyes of his mad sister Alice? Or a son—with the contradictions and weaknesses, without the gifts, of his father? Men have different ways of challenging the future. But that particular way called paternity had never in his most optimistic moments appealed to Manisty.

And of course Eleanor understood him! He had not been ungrateful. No!—he knew well enough that he had the power to make a woman's hours pass pleasantly. Eleanor's winter had been a happy one; her health and spirits had alike revived. Friendship, as they had known it, was a very rare and exquisite thing. No doubt when the book was done with, their relations must change somewhat. He confessed that he might have been imprudent; that he might have been appropriating the energies and sympathies of a delightful woman, as a man is hardly justified in doing, unless—. But, after all, a few weeks more would see the end of it; and friends, dear, close friends, they must always be.

For now there was plenty of room and leisure in his life for these subtler bonds. The day of great passions was gone by. There were one or two incidents in his earlier manhood on which he could look back with the half-triumphant consciousness that no man had dived deeper to the heart of feeling, had drunk more wildly, more inventively, of passion than he, in more than one country of Europe, in the East as in the West. These events had occurred in those wander-years between twenty and thirty, which he had spent in travelling, hunting and writing, in the pursuit, alternately eager and fastidious, of as wide an experience as possible. But all that was over. These things concerned another man, in another world. Politics and ambition had possessed him since, and women now appealed to other instincts in him—instincts rather of the diplomatist and intriguer than of the lover. Of late years they had been his friends and instruments. And by no unworthy arts. They were delightful to him; and his power with them was based on natural sympathies and divinations that were perhaps his birthright. His father had had the same gift. Why deny that both his father and he had owed much to women? What was there to be ashamed of? His father had been one of the ablest and most respected men of his day and so far as English society was concerned, the son had no scandal, nor the shadow of one, upon his conscience.

How far did Eleanor divine him? He raised his shoulder with a smile. Probably she knew him better than he knew himself. Besides, she was no mere girl, brimful of illusions and dreaming of love-affairs. What a history!—Good heavens! Why had he not known and seen something of her in the days when she was still under the tyranny of that intolerable husband? He might have eased the weight a little—protected her—as a kinsman may. Ah well—better not! They were both younger then.—

As for the present,—let him only extricate himself from this coil in which he stood, find his way back to activity and his rightful place, and many things might look differently. Perhaps—who could say?—in the future, when youth was still further forgotten by both of them, he and Eleanor might after all take each other by the hand—sit down on either side of the same hearth—their present friendship pass into one of another kind? It was quite possible, only—

The sudden crash of a glass door made him look round. It was Miss Foster who was hastening along the enclosed passage leading to the outer stair. She had miscalculated the strength of the wind on the north side of the house, and the glass door communicating with the library had slipped from her hand. She passed Manisty with a rather scared penitent look, quickly opened the outer door, and ran downstairs.

Manisty watched her as she turned into the garden. The shadows of the ilex-avenue chequered her straw bonnet, her prim black cape, her white skirt. There had been no meddling of freakish hands with her dark hair this morning. It was tightly plaited at the back of her head. Her plain sun-shade, her black kid gloves were neatness itself—middle-class, sabbatical neatness.

Manisty recalled his thoughts of the last half-hour with a touch of amusement. He had been meditating on 'women'—the delightfulness of 'women,' his own natural inclination to their society. But how narrow is everybody's world!

His collective noun of course had referred merely to that small, high-bred, cosmopolitan class which presents types like Eleanor Burgoyne. And here came this girl, walking through his dream, to remind him of what 'woman,' average virtuous woman of the New or the Old World, is really like.

All the same, she walked well,—carried her head remarkably well. There was a free and springing youth in all her movements that he could not but follow with eyes that noticed all such things as she passed through the old trees, and the fragments of Græco-Roman sculpture placed among them.

* * * * *

That afternoon Lucy Foster was sitting by herself in the garden of the villa. She had a volume of sermons by a famous Boston preacher in her hand, and was alternately reading—and looking. Miss Manisty had told her that some visitors from Rome would probably arrive between four and five o'clock, and close to her indeed the little butler, running hither and thither with an anxiety, an effusion that no English servant would have deigned to show, was placing chairs and tea-tables and putting out tea-things.

Presently indeed Alfredo approached the silent lady sitting under the trees, on tip-toe.

Would the signorina be so very kind as to come and look at the tables? The signora—so all the household called Miss Manisty—had given directions—but he, Alfredo, was not sure—and it would be so sad if when she came out she were not satisfied!

Lucy rose and went to look. She discovered some sugar-tongs missing. Alfredo started like the wind in search of them, running down the avenue with short, scudding steps, his coat-tails streaming behind him.

What a child-like eagerness to please! Yet he had been five years in the cavalry; he was admirably educated; he wrote a better hand than Manisty's own, and when his engagement at the villa came to an end he was already, thanks to a very fair scientific knowledge, engaged as manager in a firework factory in Rome.

Lucy's look pursued the short flying figure of the butler with a smiling kindness. What was wrong with this clever and loveable people that Mr. Manisty should never have a good word for their institutions, or their history, or their public men? Unjust! Nor was he even consistent with his own creed. He, so moody and silent with Mrs. Burgoyne and Miss Manisty, could always find a smile and a phrase for the natives. The servants adored him, and all the long street of Marinata welcomed him with friendly eyes. His Italian was fluency itself; and his handsome looks perhaps, his keen commanding air gave him a natural kingship among a susceptible race.

But to laugh and live with a people, merely that you might gibbet it before Europe, that you might show it as the Helot among nations—there was a kind of treachery in it! Lucy Foster remembered some of the talk and feeling in America after the Manistys' visit there had borne fruit in certain hostile lectures and addresses on the English side of the water. She had shared the feeling. She was angry still. And her young ignorance and sympathy were up in arms so far on behalf of Italy. Who and what was this critic that he should blame so freely, praise so little?

Not that Mr. Manisty had so far confided any of his views to her! It seemed to her that she had hardly spoken with him since that first evening of her arrival. But she had heard further portions of his book read aloud; taken from the main fabric this time and not from the embroideries. The whole villa indeed was occupied, and pre-occupied by the book. Mrs. Burgoyne was looking pale and worn with the stress of it.

Mrs. Burgoyne! The girl fell into a wondering reverie. She was Mr. Manisty's second cousin—she had lost her husband and child in some frightful accident—she was not going to marry Mr. Manisty—at least nobody said so—and though she went to mass, she was not a Catholic, but on the contrary a Scotch Presbyterian, by birth, being the daughter of a Scotch laird of old family—one General Delafield Muir—?

'She is very kind to me,' thought Lucy Foster in a rush of gratitude mixed with some perplexity.—'I don't know why she takes so much trouble about me. She is so different—so—so fashionable—so experienced. She can't care a bit about me. Yet she is very sweet to me—to everybody, indeed. But—'

And again she lost herself in ponderings on the relation of Mr. Manisty to his cousin. She had never seen anything like it. The mere neighbourhood of it thrilled her, she could not have told why. Was it the intimacy that it implied—the intimacy of mind and thought? It was like marriage—but married people were more reserved, more secret. Yet of course it was only friendship. Miss Manisty had said that her nephew and Mrs. Burgoyne were 'very great friends.' Well—One read of such things—one did not often see them.

* * * * *

The sound of steps approaching made her lift her eyes.

It was not Alfredo, but a young man, a young Englishman apparently, who was coming towards her. He was fair-haired and smiling; he carried his hat under his arm; and he wore a light suit and a rose in his button-hole—this was all she had time to see before he was at her side.

'May I introduce myself? I must!—Miss Manisty told me to come and find you. I'm Reggie Brooklyn—Mrs. Burgoyne's friend. Haven't you heard of me? I look after her when Manisty ought to, and doesn't; I'm going to take you all to St. Peter's next week.'

Lucy looked up to see a charming face, lit by the bluest of blue eyes, adorned moreover by a fair moustache, and an expression at once confident and appealing.

Was this the 'delightful boy' from the Embassy Mrs. Burgoyne had announced to her? No doubt. The colour rose softly in her cheek. She was not accustomed to young gentlemen with such a manner and such a savoir faire.

'Won't you sit down?' She moved sedately to one side of the bench.

He settled himself at once, fanning himself with his hat, and looking at her discreetly.

'You're American, aren't you? You don't mind my asking you?'

'Not in the least. Yes; it's my first time in Europe.'

'Well, Italy's not bad; is it? Nice place, Rome, anyway. Aren't you rather knocked over by it? I was when I first came.'

'I've only been here four days.

'And of course nobody here has time to take you about. I can guess that!
How's the book getting on?'

'I don't know,' she said, opening her eyes wide in a smile that would not be repressed, a smile that broke like light in her grave face.

Her companion looked at her with approval.

'My word! she's dowdy'—he thought—'like a Sunday-school teacher. But she's handsome.'

The real point was, however, that Mrs. Burgoyne had told him to go out and make himself agreeable, and he was accustomed to obey orders from that quarter.

'Doesn't he read it to you all day and all night?' he asked. 'That's his way.'

'I have heard some of it. It's very interesting.'

The young man shrugged his shoulders.

'It's a queer business that book. My chief here is awfully sick about it. So are a good many other English. Why should an Englishman come out here and write a book to run down Italy?—And an Englishman that's been in the Government, too—so of course what he says'll have authority. Why, we're friends with Italy—we've always stuck up for Italy! When I think what he's writing—and what a row it'll make—I declare I'm ashamed to look one's Italian friends in the face!—And just now, too, when they're so down on their luck.'

For it was the year of the Abyssinian disasters; and the carnage of Adowa was not yet two months old.

Lucy's expression showed her sympathy.

'What makes him—'

'Take such a twisted sort of a line? O goodness! what makes Manisty do anything? Of course, I oughtn't to talk. I'm just an understrapper—and he's a man of genius,—more or less—we all know that. But what made him do what he did last year? I say it was because his chief—he was in the Education Office you know—was a Dissenter, and a jam manufacturer, and had mutton-chop whisker. Manisty just couldn't do what he was told by a man like that. He's as proud as Lucifer. I once heard him tell a friend of mine that he didn't know how to obey anybody—he'd never learnt. That's because they didn't send him to a public school—worse luck; that was his mother's doing, I believe. She thought him so clever—he must be treated differently to other people. Don't you think that's a great mistake?'

'What?'

'Why—to prefer the cross-cuts, when you might stick to the high road?'

The American girl considered. Then she flashed into a smile.—

'I think I'm for the cross-cuts!'

'Ah—that's because you're American. I might have known you'd say that. All your people want to go one better than anybody else. But I can tell you it doesn't do for Englishmen. They want their noses kept to the grindstone. That's my experience! Of course it was a great pity Manisty ever went into Parliament at all. He'd been abroad for seven or eight years, living with all the big-wigs and reactionaries everywhere. The last thing in the world he knew anything about was English politics.—But then his father had been a Liberal, and a Minister for ever so long. And when Manisty came home, and the member for his father's division died, I don't deny it was very natural they should put him in. And he's such a queer mixture, I dare say he didn't know himself where he was.—But I'll tell you one thing—'

He shook his head slowly,—with all the airs of the budding statesman.

'When you've joined a party,—you must dine with 'em:—It don't sound much—but I declare it's the root of everything. Now Manisty was always dining with the other side. All the great Tory ladies,—and the charming High Churchwomen, and the delightful High Churchmen—and they are nice fellows, I can tell you!—got hold of him. And then it came to some question about these beastly schools—don't you wish they were all at the bottom of the sea?—and I suppose his chief was more annoying than usual—(oh, but he had a number of other coolnesses on his hands by that time—he wasn't meant to be a Liberal!) and his friends talked to him—and so—Ah! there they are!

And lifting his hat, the young man waved it towards Mrs. Burgoyne who with Manisty and three or four other companions had just become visible at the further end of the ilex-avenue which stretched from their stone bench to the villa.

'Why, that's my chief,'—he cried—'I didn't think he was to be here this afternoon. I say, do you know my chief?'

And he turned to her with the brightest, most confiding manner, as though he had been the friend of her cradle.

'Who?'—said Lucy, bewildered—'the tall gentleman with the white hair?'

'Yes,—that's the ambassador. Oh! I'm glad you'll see him. He's a charmer, is our chief! And that's his married daughter, who's keeping house for him just now.—I'll tell you something, if you'll keep a secret'—he bent towards her,—'He likes Mrs. Burgoyne of course,—everybody does—but he don't take Manisty at his own valuation. I've heard him say some awfully good things to Manisty—you'd hardly think a man would get over them.—Who's that on the other side?'

He put his hand over his eyes for a moment, then burst into a laugh.—

'Why, it's the other man of letters!—Bellasis. I should think you've read some of his poems—or plays? Rome has hardly been able to hold the two of them this winter. It's worse than the archæologists. Mrs. Burgoyne is always trying to be civil to him, so that he mayn't make uncivil remarks about Manisty. I say—don't you think she's delightful?'

He lowered his voice as he looked round upon his companion, but his blue eyes shone.

'Mrs. Burgoyne?'—said Lucy—'Yes, indeed!—She's so—so very kind.'

'Oh! she's a darling, is Eleanor Burgoyne. And I may call her that, you know, for I'm her cousin, just as Manisty is—only on the other side. I have been trying to look after her a bit this winter in Rome; she never looks after herself. And she's not a bit strong.—You know her history of course?'

He lowered his voice with young importance, speaking almost in a whisper, though the advancing party were still far away. Lucy shook her head.

'Well, it's a ghastly tale, and I've only a minute.—Her husband, you see, had pneumonia—they were in Switzerland together, and he'd taken a chill after a walk—and one night he was raving mad, mad you understand with delirium and fever—and poor Eleanor was so ill, they had taken her away from her husband, and put her to bed on the other side of the hotel.—And there was a drunken nurse—it's almost too horrible, isn't it?—and while she was asleep Mr. Burgoyne got up, quite mad—and he went into the next room, where the baby was, without waking anybody, and he took the child out asleep in his arms, back to his own room where the windows were open, and there he threw himself and the boy out together—headlong! The hotel was high up,—built, one side of it, above a rock wall, with a stream below it.—There had been a great deal of rain, and the river was swollen. The bodies were not found for days.—When poor Eleanor woke up, she had lost everything.—Oh! I dare say, when the first shock was over, the husband didn't so much matter—he hadn't made her at all happy.—But the child!'—

He stopped, Mrs. Burgoyne's gay voice could be heard as she approached. All the elegance of the dress was visible, the gleam of a diamond at the throat, the flowers at the waist. Lucy Foster's eyes, dim with sudden tears, fastened themselves upon the slender, advancing form.

CHAPTER IV

The party grouped themselves round the tea-tables. Mrs. Burgoyne laid a kind hand on Lucy Foster's arm, and introduced one or two of the new-comers.

Then, while Miss Manisty, a little apart, lent her ear to the soft chat of the ambassador, who sat beside her, supporting a pair of old and very white hands upon a gold-headed stick, Mrs. Burgoyne busied herself with Mr. Bellasis and his tea. For he was anxious to catch a train, and had but a short time to spare.

He was a tall stiffly built man, with a heavy white face, and a shock of black hair combed into a high and bird-like crest. As to Mrs. Burgoyne's attentions, he received them with a somewhat pinched but still smiling dignity. Manisty, meanwhile, a few feet away, was fidgetting on his chair, in one of his most unmanageable moods. Around him were two or three young men bearing the great names of Rome. They all belonged to the Guardia Nobile, and were all dressed by English tailors. Two of them, moreover, were the sons of English mothers. They were laughing and joking together, and every now and then they addressed their host. But he scarcely replied. He gathered stalk after stalk of grass from the ground beside him, nibbled it and threw it away—a constant habit of his when he was annoyed or out of spirits.

"So you have read my book?" said Mr. Bellasis pleasantly, addressing Mrs. Burgoyne, as she handed him a cup of tea. The book in question was long; it revived the narrative verse of our grandfathers; and in spite of the efforts of a 'set' the world was not disposed to take much notice of it.

'Yes, indeed! We liked it so much.—But I think when I wrote to you I told you what we thought about it?'

And she glanced towards Manisty for support. He, however, did not apparently hear what she said. Mr. Bellasis also looked round in his direction; but in vain. The poet's face clouded.

'May I ask what reading you are at?' he said, returning to his tea.

'What reading?'—Mrs. Burgoyne looked puzzled.

'Have you read it more than once?'

She coloured.

'No—I'm afraid—'

'Ah!—my friends tell me in Rome that the book cannot be really appreciated except at a second or third reading—'

Mrs. Burgoyne looked up in dismay, as a shower of gravel descended on the tea-table. Manisty has just beckoned in haste to his great Newfoundland who was lying stretched on the gravel path, and the dog bounding towards him, seemed to have brought the path with him.

Mr. Bellasis impatiently shook some fragments of gravel from his coat, and resumed:—

'I have just got a batch of the first reviews. Really criticism has become an absurdity! Did you look at the "Sentinel"?'

Mrs. Burgoyne hesitated.

'Yes—I saw there was something about the style—'

'The style!'—Mr. Bellasis threw himself back in his chair and laughed loud—'Why the style is done with a magnifying-glass!—There's not a phrase,—not a word that I don't stand by.'

'Mr. Bellasis'—said the courteous voice of the ambassador—'are you going by this train?'

The great man held out his watch.

'Yes indeed—and I must catch it!' cried the man of letters. He started to his feet, and bending over Mrs. Burgoyne, he said in an aside perfectly audible to all the world—'I read my new play to-night—just finished—at Madame Salvi's!'

Eleanor smiled and congratulated him. He took his leave, and Manisty in an embarrassed silence accompanied him half way down the avenue.

Then returning, he threw himself into a chair near Lucy Foster and young
Brooklyn, with a sigh of relief.

'Intolerable ass!'—he said under his breath, as though quite unconscious of any bystander.

The young man looked at Lucy with eyes that danced.

* * * * *

'Who is your young lady?' said the ambassador.

Miss Manisty explained.

'An American? Really? I was quite off the scent. But now—I see—I see! Let me guess. She is a New Englander—not from Boston, but from the country. I remember the type exactly. The year I was at Washington I spent some weeks in the summer convalescing at a village up in the hills of Maine.—The women there seemed to me the salt of the earth. May I go and talk to her?'

Miss Manisty led him across the circle to Lucy, and introduced him.

'Will you take me to the terrace and show me St. Peter's? I know one can see it from here,' said the suave polished voice.

Lucy rose in a shy pleasure that became her. The thought flashed happily through her, as she walked beside the old man, that Uncle Ben would like to hear of it! She had that 'respect of persons' which comes not from snobbishness, but from imagination and sympathy. The man's office thrilled her, not his title.

The ambassador's shrewd eyes ran over her face and bearing, taking note of all the signs of character. Then he began to talk, exerting himself as he had not exerted himself that morning for a princess who had lunched at his table. And as he was one of the enchanters of his day, known for such in half a dozen courts, and two hemispheres, Lucy Foster's walk was a walk of delight. There was only one drawback. She had heard some member of the party say 'Your Excellency'—and somehow her lips would not pronounce it! Yet so kind and kingly was the old man, there was no sign of homage she would not have gladly paid him, if she had known how.

They emerged at last upon the stone terrace at the edge of the garden looking out upon the Campagna.

'Ah! there it is!'—said the ambassador, and, walking to the corner of the terrace, he pointed northwards.

And there—just caught between two stone pines—in the dim blue distance rose the great dome.

'Doesn't it give you an emotion?' he said, smiling down upon her.—'When I first stayed on these hills I wrote a poem about it—a very bad poem. There's a kind of miracle in it, you know. Go where you will, that dome follows you. Again and again, storm and mist may blot out the rest—that remains. The peasants on these hills have a superstition about it. They look for that dome as they look for the sun. When they can't see it, they are unhappy—they expect some calamity.—It's a symbol, isn't it, an idea?—and those are the things that touch us. I have a notion'—he turned to her smiling, 'that it will come into Mr. Manisty's book?'

Their eyes met in a smiling assent.

"Well, there are symbols—and symbols. That dome makes my old heart beat because it speaks of so much—half the history of our race. But looking back—I remember another symbol—I was at Harvard in '69; and I remember the first time I ever saw those tablets—you recollect—in the Memorial Hall—to the Harvard men that fell in the war?"

The colour leapt into her cheek. Her eyes filled.

"Oh yes! yes!"—she said, half eager, half timid—"My father lost two brothers—both their names are there."

The ambassador looked at her kindly.—"Well—be proud of it!—be proud of it! That wall, those names, that youth, and death—they remain with me, as the symbol of the other great majesty in the world! There's one,"—he pointed to the dome,—"that's Religion. And the other's Country. It's country that Mr. Manisty forgets—isn't it?"

The old man shook his head, and fell silent, looking out over the cloud-flecked Campagna.

"Ah, well"—he said, rousing himself—"I must go. Will you come and see me?
My daughter shall write to you."

And five minutes later the ambassador was driving swiftly towards Rome, in a good humour with himself and the day. He had that morning sent off what he knew to be a masterly despatch, and in the afternoon, as he was also quite conscious, he had made a young thing happy.

* * * * *

Manisty could not attend the ambassador to his carriage. He was absorbed by another guest. Mrs. Burgoyne, young Brooklyn, and Lucy, paid the necessary civilities.

When they returned, they found a fresh group gathered on the terrace. Two persons made the centre of it—a grey-haired cardinal—and Manisty.

Lucy looked at her host in amazement. What a transformation! The man who had been lounging and listless all the afternoon—barely civil to his guests—making no effort indeed for anyone, was now another being. An hour before he had been in middle age; now he was young, handsome, courteous, animating, and guiding the conversation around him with the practised ease of one who knew himself a master.

Where was the spell? The Cardinal?

The Cardinal sat to Manisty's right, one wrinkled hand resting on the neck of the Newfoundland. It was a typical Italian face, large-cheeked and large-jawed, with good eyes,—a little sleepy, but not unspiritual. His red-edged cassock allowed a glimpse of red stockings to be seen, and his finely worked cross and chain, his red sash, and the bright ribbon that lit up his broad-brimmed hat, made spots of cheerful colour in the shadow of the trees.

He was a Cardinal of the Curia, belonging indeed to the Congregation of the
Index. The vulgar believed that he was staying on the hills for his health.

The initiated, however, knew that he had come to these heights, bringing with him the works of a certain German Catholic professor threatened with the thunders of the Church. It was a matter that demanded leisure and a quiet mind.

As he sat sipping Miss Manisty's tea, however, nothing could be divined of those scathing Latin sheets on which he had left his secretary employed. He had the air of one at peace with all the world—hardly stirred indeed by the brilliance of his host.

'Italy again!'—said Reggie Brooklyn in Lucy's ear—poor old Italy!—one might be sure of that, when one sees one of these black gentlemen about.'

The Cardinal indeed had given Manisty his text. He had brought an account of some fresh vandalism of the Government—the buildings of an old Umbrian convent turned to Government uses—the disappearance of some famous pictures in the process, supposed to have passed into the bands of a Paris dealer by the connivance of a corrupt official.

The story had roused Manisty to a white heat. This maltreatment of religious buildings and the wasting of their treasures was a subject on which he was inexhaustible. Encouraged by the slow smile of the Cardinal, the laughter and applause of the young men, he took the history of a monastery in the mountains of Spoleto, which had long been intimately known to him, and told it,—with a variety, a passion, an irony, that only he could achieve—that at last revealed indeed to Lucy Foster, as she sat quivering with antagonism beside Miss Manisty, all the secret of the man's fame and power in the world.

For gradually—from the story of this monastery, and its suppression at the hands of a few Italian officials—he built up a figure, typical, representative, according to him, of the New Italy, small, insolent, venal,—insulting and despoiling the Old Italy, venerable, beautiful and defenceless. And then a natural turn of thought, or a suggestion from one of the group surrounding him, brought him to the scandals connected with the Abyssinian campaign—to the charges of incompetence and corruption which every Radical paper was now hurling against the Crispi government. He gave the latest gossip, handling it lightly, inexorably, as one more symptom of an inveterate disease, linking the men of the past with the men of the present, spattering all with the same mud, till Italian Liberalism, from Cavour to Crispi, sat shivering and ugly—stripped of all those pleas and glories wherewith she had once stepped forth adorned upon the page of history.

Finally—with the art of the accomplished talker—a transition! Back to the mountains, and the lonely convent on the heights—to the handful of monks left in the old sanctuary, handing on the past, waiting for the future, heirs of a society which would destroy and outlive the New Italy, as it had destroyed and outlived the Old Rome,—offering the daily sacrifice amid the murmur and solitude of the woods,—confident, peaceful, unstained; while the new men in the valleys below peculated and bribed, swarmed and sweated, in the mire of a profitless and purposeless corruption.

And all this in no set harangue—but in vivid broken sentences; in snatches of paradox and mockery; of emotion touched and left; interrupted, moreover, by the lively give and take of conversation with the young Italians, by the quiet comments of the Cardinal. None the less, the whole final image emerged, as Manisty meant it to emerge; till the fascinated hearers felt, as it were, a breath of hot bitterness and hate pass between them and the spring day, enveloping the grim phantom of a ruined and a doomed State.

The Cardinal said little. Every now and then he put in a fact of his own knowledge—a stroke of character—a phrase of compassion that bit more sharply even than Manisty's scorns—a smile—a shake of the head. And sometimes, as Manisty talked with the young men, the sharp wrinkled eyes rested upon the Englishman with a scrutiny, instantly withdrawn. All the caution of the Roman ecclesiastic,—the inheritance of centuries—spoke in the glance.

It was perceived by no one, however, but a certain dark elderly lady, who was sitting restlessly silent beside Miss Manisty. Lucy Foster had noticed her as a new-comer, and believed that her name was Madame Variani.

As for Eleanor Burgoyne, she sat on Manisty's left while he talked—it was curious to notice how a place was always made for her beside him!—her head raised a little towards him, her eyes bright and fixed. The force that breathed from him passed through her frail being, quickening every pulse of life. She neither criticised nor accepted what he said. It was the man's splendid vitality that subdued and mastered her.

Yet she alone knew what no one else suspected. At the beginning of the conversation Manisty had placed himself behind an old stone table of oblong shape and thick base, of which there were several in the garden. Round it grew up grasses and tall vetches which had sown themselves among the gaping stones of the terrace. Nothing, therefore, could be seen of the talker as he leant carelessly across the table but the magnificent head, and the shoulders on which it was so freely and proudly carried.

Anybody noticing the effect—for it was an effect—would have thought it a mere happy accident. Eleanor Burgoyne alone knew that it was conscious. She had seen the same pose, the same concealment practised too often to be mistaken. But it made no difference whatever to the spell that held her. The small vanities and miseries of Manisty's nature were all known to her—and alas! she would not have altered one of them!

* * * * *

When the Cardinal rose to go, two Italian girls, who had come with their brother, the Count Casaleschi, ran forward, and curtseying kissed the Cardinal's ring. And as he walked away, escorted by Manisty, a gardener crossed the avenue, who also at sight of the tall red-sashed figure fell on his knees and did the same. The Cardinal gave him an absent nod and smile, and passed on.

'Ah! j'étouffe!'—cried Madame Variani, throwing herself down by Miss Manisty. 'Give me another cup, chère Madame. Your nephew is too bad. Let him show us another nation born in forty years—that has had to make itself in a generation—let him show it us! Ah! you English—with all your advantages—and your proud hearts.—Perhaps we too could pick some holes in you!'

She fanned herself with angry vigour. The young men came to stand round her arguing and laughing. She was a favourite in Rome, and as a French woman, and the widow of a Florentine man of letters, occupied a somewhat independent position, and was the friend of many different groups.

'And you—young lady, what do you think?'—she said suddenly, laying a large hand on Lucy Foster's knee.

Lucy, startled, looked into the sparkling black eyes brought thus close to her own.

'But I just long'—she said, catching her breath—'to hear the other side.'

'Ah, and you shall hear it, my dear—you shall!' cried Madame Variani. 'N'est-ce pas, Madame?' she said, addressing Miss Manisty—'We will get rid of all those priests—and then we will speak our mind? Oh, and you too,'—she waved her hand with a motherly roughness towards the young men,—'What do you know about it, Signor Marchese? If there were no Guardia Nobile, you would not wear those fine uniforms.—That is why you like the Pope.'

The Marchese Vitellucci—a charming boy of two and twenty, tall, thin-faced and pensive,—laughed and bowed.

'The Pope, Madame, should establish some dames d'honneur. Then he would have all the ladies too on his side.

'O, mon Dieu!—he has enough of them,' cried Madame Variani. 'But here comes Mr. Manisty, I must drink my tea and hold my tongue. I am going out to dinner to-night, and if one gets hot and cross, that is not good for the complexion.'

Manisty advanced at his usual quick pace, his head sunk once more between his shoulders.

Young Vitellucci approached him. 'Ah! Carlo!' he said, looking up affectionately—'dear fellow!—Come for a stroll with me.'

And linking his arm in the young man's, he carried him off. Their peals of laughter could be heard coming back from the distance of the ilex-walk.

Madame Variani tilted back her chair to look after them.

'Ah! your nephew can be agreeable too, when he likes,' she said to Miss Manisty. 'I do not say no. But when he talks of these poor Italians, he is méchant—méchant!'

As for Lucy Foster, as Manisty passed out of sight, she felt her pulses still tingling with a wholly new sense of passionate hostility—dislike even. But none the less did the stage seem empty and meaningless when he had left it.

* * * * *

Manisty and Mrs. Burgoyne were closeted in the library for some time before dinner. Lucy in the salon could hear him pacing up and down, and the deep voice dictating.

Then Mrs. Burgoyne came into the salon, and not noticing the girl who was hidden behind a great pot of broom threw herself on the sofa with a long sigh of fatigue. Lucy could just see the pale face against the pillow and the closed eyes. Thus abandoned and at rest, there was something strangely pitiful in the whole figure, for all its grace.

A wave of feeling rose in the girl's breast. She slipped softly from her hiding-place, took a silk wrap that was lying on a chair, and approached Mrs. Burgoyne.

'Let me put this over you. Won't you sleep before dinner? And I will shut the window. It is getting cold.'

Mrs. Burgoyne opened her eyes in astonishment, and murmured a few words of thanks.

Lucy covered her up, closed the window, and was stealing away, when Mrs.
Burgoyne put out a hand and touched her.

'It is very sweet of you to think of me.'

She drew the girl to her, enclosed the hand she had taken in both hers, pressed it and released it. Lucy went quietly out of the room.

Then till dinner she sat reading her New Testament, and trying rather piteously to remind herself that it was Sunday. Far away in a New England village, the bells were ringing for the evening meeting. Lucy, shutting her eyes, could smell the spring scents in the church lane, could hear the droning of the opening hymn. A vague mystical peace stole upon her, as she recalled the service; the great words of 'sin,' 'salvation,' 'righteousness,' as the Evangelical understands them, thrilled through her heart.

Then, as she rose to dress, there burst upon her through the open window the sunset blaze of the Campagna with the purple dome in its midst. And with that came the memory of the afternoon,—of the Cardinal—and Manisty.

Very often, in these first days, it was as though her mind ached, under the stress of new thinking, like something stretched and sore. In the New England house where she had grown up, a corner of the old-fashioned study was given up to the books of her grandfather, the divinity professor. They were a small collection, all gathered with one object,—the confuting and confronting of Rome. Like many another Protestant zealot, the old professor had brooded on the crimes and cruelties of persecuting Rome, till they became a madness in the blood. How well Lucy remembered his books—with their backs of faded grey or brown cloths, and their grim titles. Most of them she had never yet been allowed to read. When she looked for a book, she was wont to pass this shelf by in a vague horror. What Rome habitually did or permitted, what at any rate she had habitually done or permitted in the past, could not—it seemed—be known by a pure woman! And she would glance from the books to the engraving of her grandfather above them,—to the stern and yet delicate face of the old Calvinist, with its high-peaked brow, and white neckcloth supporting the sharp chin; lifting her heart to him in a passionate endorsement, a common fierce hatred of wrong and tyranny.

She had grown older since then, and her country with her. New England Puritanism was no longer what it had been; and the Catholic Church had spread in the land. But in Uncle Ben's quiet household, and in her own feeling, the changes had been but slight and subtle. Pity, perhaps, had insensibly taken the place of hatred. But those old words 'priest' and 'mass' still rung in her ears as symbols of all that man had devised to corrupt and deface the purity of Christ.

And of what that purity might be, she had such tender, such positive traditions! Her mother had been a Christian mystic—a 'sweet woman,' meek as a dove in household life, yet capable of the fiercest ardours as a preacher and missionary, gathering rough labourers into barns and by the wayside, and dying before her time, worn out by the imperious energies of religion. Lucy had always before her the eyes that seemed to be shining through a mist, the large tremulous mouth, the gently furrowed brow. Those strange forces—'grace'—and 'the spirit'—had been the realities, the deciding powers of her childhood, whether in what concerned the great emotions of faith, or the most trivial incidents of ordinary life—writing a letter—inviting a guest—taking a journey. The soul bare before God, depending on no fleshly aid, distracted by no outward rite; sternly defending its own freedom as a divine trust:—she had been reared on these main thoughts of Puritanism, and they were still through all insensible transformation, the guiding forces of her own being.

Already, in this Catholic country, she had been jarred and repelled on all sides. Yet she found herself living with two people for whom Catholicism was not indeed a personal faith—she could not think of that side of it without indignation—but a thing to be passionately admired and praised, like art, or music, or scenery. You might believe nothing, and yet write pages and pages in glorification of the Pope and the Mass, and in contempt of everything else!—in excuse too of every kind of tyranny so long as it served the Papacy and 'the Church.'

She leaned out to the sunset, remembering sentence after sentence from the talk on the terrace—hating or combating them all.

Yet all the time a new excitement invaded her. For the man who had spoken thus was, in a sense, not a mere stranger to her. Somewhere in his being must be the capacity for those thoughts and feelings that had touched her so deeply in his book—for that magical insight and sweetness—

Ah!—perhaps she had not understood his book—no more than she understood him now. The sense of her own ignorance oppressed her—and of all that might be said, with regard apparently to anything whatever. Was there nothing quite true—quite certain—in the world?

So the girl's intense and simple nature entered like all its fellows, upon the old inevitable struggle. As she stood there, with locked hands and flushed cheeks, conscious through every vein of the inrush and shock of new perceptions, new comparisons, she was like a ship that leaves the harbour for the open, and feels for the first time on all her timbers the strain of the unplumbed sea.

And of this invasion, this excitement, the mind, in haunting debate and antagonism, made for itself one image, one symbol—the face of Edward Manisty.

CHAPTER V

While he was thus—unknowing—the cause of so many new attractions and repulsions in his guest's mind, Manisty, after the first shock of annoyance produced by her arrival was over, hardly remembered her existence. He was incessantly occupied by the completion of his book, working late and early, sometimes in high and even extravagant spirits, but, on the whole, more commonly depressed and discontented.

Eleanor Burgoyne worked with him or for him many hours in each day. Her thin pallor became more pronounced. She ate little, and Miss Manisty believed that she slept less. The elder lady indeed began to fidget and protest, to remonstrate now and then with Manisty himself, even to threaten a letter to 'the General.' Eleanor's smiling obstinacy, however, carried all before it. And Manisty, in spite of a few startled looks and perfunctory dissuasions, whenever his aunt attacked him, soon slipped back into his normal ways of depending on his cousin, and not being able to work without her. Lucy Foster thought him selfish and inconsiderate. It gave her one more cause of quarrel with him.

For she and Mrs. Burgoyne were slowly but surely making friends. The clearer it became that Manisty took no notice of Miss Foster, and refused to be held in any way responsible for her entertainment, the more anxious, it seemed, did Eleanor show herself to make life pleasant for the American girl. Her manner, which had always been kind, became more natural and gay. It was as though she had settled some question with herself, and settled it entirely to Lucy Foster's advantage.

Not much indeed could be done for the stranger while the stress of Manisty's work lasted. Aunt Pattie braced herself once or twice, got out the guide-books and took her visitor into Rome to see the sights. But the little lady was so frankly worn out by these expeditions, that Lucy, full of compunctions, could only beg to be left to herself in future. Were not the garden and the lake, the wood-paths to Rocca di Papa, and the roads to Albano good enough?

So presently it came to her spending many hours alone in the terraced garden on the hill-side, with all the golden Campagna at her feet. Her young fancy, however, soon learnt to look upon that garden as the very concentration and symbol of Italy. All the Italian elements, the Italian magics were there. Along its topmost edge ran a vast broken wall, built into the hill; and hanging from the brink of the wall like a long roof, great ilexes shut out the day from the path below. Within the thickness of the wall—in days when, in that dim Rome upon the plain, many still lived who could remember the voice and the face of Paul of Tarsus—Domitian had made niches and fountains; and he had thrown over the terrace, now darkened by the great ilex boughs, a long portico roof supported on capitals and shafts of gleaming marble. Then in the niches round the clear fountains, he had ranged the fine statues of a still admirable art; everywhere he had lavished marbles, rose and yellow and white, and under foot he had spread a mosaic floor, glistening beneath the shadow-play of leaf and water, in the rich reflected light from the garden and the Campagna outside; while at intervals, he had driven through the very crest of the hill long tunnelled passages, down which one might look from the garden and see the blue lake shining at their further end.

And still the niches and the recesses were there,—the huge wall too along the face of the hill; all broken and gashed and ruinous, showing the fine reticulated brickwork that had been once faced with marble; alternately supported and torn by the pushing roots of the ilex-trees. The tunnelled passages too were there, choked and fallen in; no flash of the lake now beyond their cool darkness! And into the crumbling surface of the wall, rude hands had built fragments of the goddesses and the Cæsars that had once reigned there, barbarously mingled with warm white morsels from the great cornice of the portico, acanthus blocks from the long buried capitals, or dolphins orphaned of Aphrodite.

The wreck was beautiful, like all wrecks in Italy where Nature has had her way. For it was masked in the gloom of the overhanging trees; or hidden behind dropping veils of ivy; or lit up by straggling patches of broom and cytisus that thrust themselves through the gaps in the Roman brickwork and shone golden in the dark. At the foot of the wall, along its whole length, ran a low marble conduit that held still the sweetest liveliest water. Lilies of the valley grew beside it, breathing scent into the shadowed air; while on the outer or garden side of the path, the grass was purple with long-stalked violets, or pink with the sharp heads of the cyclamen. And a little further, from the same grass, there shot up in a happy neglect, tall camellia-trees ragged and laden, strewing the ground red and white beneath them. And above the camellias again, the famous stone-pines of the villa climbed into the high air, overlooking the plain and the sea, peering at Rome and Soracte.

So old it was!—and yet so fresh with spring! In the mornings at least the spring was uppermost. It silenced the plaint of outraged beauty which the place seemed to be always making, under a flutter of growth and song. Water and flowers and nightingales, the shadow, the sunlight, and the heat, were all alike strong and living,—Italy untamed. It was only in the evenings that Lucy shunned the path. For then, from the soil below and the wall above, there crept out the old imprisoned forces of sadness, or of poison, and her heart flagged or her spirits sank as she sat or walked there. Marinata has no malaria; but on old soils, and as night approaches, there is always something in the shade of Italy that fights with human life. The poor ghosts rise from the earth—jealous of those that are still walking the warm ways of the world.

But in the evenings, when the Fountain Walk drove her forth, the central hot zone of the garden was divine, with its roses and lilacs, its birds, its exquisite grass alive with shining lizards, jewelled with every flower, breathing every scent; and at its edge the old terrace with its balustrade, set above the Campagna, commanding the plain and the sea, the sky and the sunsets.

Evening after evening Lucy might have been found perched on the stone coping of the balustrade, sometimes trying, through the warm silent hours, by the help of this book or that, to call up again the old Roman life; sometimes dreaming of what there might still be—what the archæologists indeed said must be—buried beneath her feet; of the marble limbs and faces pressed into the earth, and all the other ruined things, small and great, mean or lovely, that lay deep in a common grave below the rustling olives, and the still leafless vineyards; and sometimes the mere passive companion of the breeze and the sun, conscious only of the chirping of the crickets, or the loudness of the nightingales, or the flight of a hoopoe, like some strange bright bird of fairy-tale, flashing from one deep garden-shadow to another.

Yet the garden was not always given up to her and the birds. Peasant folk coming from Albano or the olive-grounds between it and the villa would take a short cut through the garden to Marinata; dark-faced gardeners, in blue linen suits, would doff their peaked hats to the strange lady; or a score or two of young black-frocked priestlings from a neighbouring seminary would suddenly throng its paths, playing mild girlish games, with infinite clamour and chatter, running races as far and fast as their black petticoats would allow, twisting their long overcoats and red sashes meanwhile round a battered old noseless bust that stood for Domitian at the end of a long ilex-avenue, and was the butt for all the slings and arrows of the day,—poor helpless State, blinded and buffeted by the Church!

Lucy would hide herself among the lilacs and the arbutus when the seminary invaded her; watching through the leaves the strapping Italian boys in their hindering womanish dress; scorning them for their state of supervision and dependence; pitying them for their destiny!

And sometimes Manisty, disturbed by the noise, would come out—pale and frowning. But at the sight of the seminarists and of the old priest in command of them, his irritable look would soften. He would stand indeed with his hands on his sides, laughing and chatting with the boys, his head uncovered, his black curls blown backward from the great furrowed brow; and in the end Lucy peering from her nook would see him pacing up and down the ilex-walk with the priest,—haranguing and gesticulating—the old man in a pleased wonder looking at the Englishman through his spectacles, and throwing in from time to time ejaculations of assent, now half puzzled, and now fanatically eager. "He is talking the book!"—Lucy would think to herself—and her mind would rise in revolt.

One day after parting with the lads he came unexpectedly past her hiding-place, and paused at sight of her. "Do the boys disturb you?" he said, glancing at her book, and speaking with the awkward abruptness which with him could in a moment take the place of ease and mirth.

"Oh no—not at all."

He fidgeted, stripping leaves from the arbutus tree under which she sat.

"That old priest who comes with them is a charming fellow!"

Her shyness gave way.

"Is he?—He looks after them like an old nurse. And they are such babies—those great boys!"

His eye kindled.

"So you would like them to be more independent—more brutal. You prefer a Harvard and Yale football match—with the dead and wounded left on the ground?"

She laughed, daring for the first time to assert herself.

"No. I don't want blood! But there is something between. However—"

She hesitated. He looked down upon her half irritable, half smiling.

"Please go on."

"It would do them no good, would it—to be independent?"

"Considering how soon they must be slaves for life? Is that what you mean?"

Her frank blue eyes raised themselves to his. He was instantly conscious of something cool and critical in her attitude towards him. Very possibly he had been conscious of it for some time, which accounted for his instinctive avoidance of her. In the crisis of thought and production through which he was passing he shrank from any touch of opposition or distrust. He distrusted himself enough. It was as though he carried about with him wounds that only Eleanor's soft touch could be allowed to approach. And from the first evening he had very naturally divined in this Yankee girl, with her mingled reserve and transparency, her sturdy Protestantisms of all sorts, elements antagonistic to himself.

She answered his question, however, by another—still referring to the seminarists.

'Isn't that the reason why they take and train them so young—that they may have no will left?'

'Well, is that the worst condition in the world—to give up your own will to an idea—a cause?'

She laughed shyly—a low musical sound that suddenly gave him, as it seemed, a new impression of her.

'You call the old priest an "idea"?'

Both had the same vision of the most portly and substantial of figures.
Manisty smiled unwillingly.

'The old priest is merely the symbol.'

She shook her head obstinately.

'He is all they know anything about. He gives orders, and they obey. Soon it will be some one else's turn to give them the orders—'

'Till the time comes for them to give orders themselves?—Well, what is there to object to in that?' He scanned her severely. 'What does it mean but that they are parts of a great system, properly organised, to a great end? Show me anything better?'

She coloured.

'It is better, isn't it, that—sometimes—one should give oneself orders?' she said in a low voice.

Manisty laughed.

'Liberty to make a fool of oneself—in short. No doubt,—that's the great modern panacea.' He paused, staring at her without being conscious of it, with his absent brilliant eyes. Then he broke out—'Well! so you despise my little priests! Did you ever think of inquiring, however, which wears best—their notion of human life, which after all has weathered 1900 years, and is as strong and prevailing as it ever was—or the sort of notion that their enemies here go to work upon? Look into the history of this Abyssinian war—everybody free to make fools of themselves, in Rome or Africa—and doing it magnificently! Private judgment—private aims everywhere—from Crispi to the smallest lieutenant. Result—universal wreck and muddle—thousands of lives thrown away—a nation brought to shame. Then look about you at what's going on—here—this week—on these hills. It's Holy Week. They're all fasting—they're all going to mass—the people working in the fields, our servants, the bright little priests. To-morrow's Holy Thursday. From now till Sunday, nobody here will eat anything but a little bread and a few olives. The bells will cease to-morrow. If a single church-bell rang in Rome—over this plain, and these mountains—through the whole of Italy—from mass to-morrow till mass on Saturday—a whole nation would feel pain and outrage. Then on Saturday—marvellous symbol!—listen for the bells. You will hear them all loosed together, as soon as the Sanctus begins—all over Italy. And on Sunday—watch the churches. If it isn't Matthew Arnold's "One common wave of thought and joy—Lifting mankind amain,"—what is it? To me, it's what keeps the human machine running. Make the comparison!—it will repay you. My little muffs of priests with their silly obedience won't come so badly out of it.'

Unconsciously he had taken a seat beside her, and was looking at her with a sharp imperious air. She dimly understood that he was not talking to her but to a much larger audience, that he was still in fact in the grip of "the book." But that he should have anyway addressed so many consecutive sentences to her excited her after these many days of absolute neglect and indifference on his part; she felt a certain tremor of pulse. Instead, however, of diminishing self-command, it bestowed it.

'Well, if that's the only way of running the machine—the Catholic way I mean,'—her words came out a little hurried and breathless—'I don't see how we exist.'

'You? America?'

She nodded.

'Do you exist?—in any sense that matters?'

He laughed as he spoke; but his tone provoked her. She threw up her head a little, suddenly grave.

'Of course we know that you dislike us.'

He showed a certain embarrassment.

'How do you know?'

'Oh!—we read what you said of us.'

'I was badly reported,' he said, smiling.

'No,'—she insisted. 'But you were mistaken in a great many things—very, very much mistaken. You judged much too quickly.'

He rose, a covert amusement playing round his lips. It was the indulgence of the politician and man of affairs towards the little backwoods girl who was setting him to rights.

'We must have it out,' he said, 'I see I shall have to defend myself. But now I fear Mrs. Burgoyne will be waiting for me.'

And lifting his hat with the somewhat stately and excessive manner, which he could always substitute at the shortest notice for brusquerie or inattention, he went his way.

Lucy Foster was left with a red cheek. She watched him till he had passed into the shadow of the avenue leading to the house; then with an impetuous movement she took up a book which had been lying beside her on the bench, and began to read it with a peculiar ardour—almost passion. It was the life of one of the heroes of the Garibaldian expedition of 1860-61.

For of late she had been surrounding herself—by the help of a library in Rome to which the Manistys had access—with the books of the Italian Risorgimento, that great movement, that heroic making of a nation, in which our fathers felt so passionate an interest, which has grown so dim and far away now, not only in the mind of a younger England, but even in that of a younger Italy.

But to Lucy—reading the story with the plain of Rome, and St. Peter's in sight, her wits quickened by the perpetual challenge of Manisty's talk with Mrs. Burgoyne, or any chance visitor,—Cavour, Garibaldi, Mazzini; all the striking figures and all the main stages in the great epic; the blind, mad, hopeless outbreaks of '48; the hangings and shootings and bottomless despairs of '49; the sullen calm of those waiting years from '49 to '58; the ecstasy of Magenta and Solferino, and the fierce disappointment of Villafranca; the wild golden days of Sicily in 1860; the plucking of Venice like a ripe fruit in '66; of Rome, in 1870; all the deliriums of freedom, vengeance, union—these immortal names and passions and actions, were thrilling through the girl's fresh poetic sense, and capturing all her sympathies. Had Italy indeed been 'made too quick'? Was all the vast struggle, and these martyred lives for nothing—all to end like a choked river in death and corruption? Well, if so, whose fault was it, but the priests'?—of that black, intriguing, traitorous Italy, headed by the Papacy, which except for one brief moment in the forties, had upheld every tyranny, and drenched every liberty in blood, had been the supporter of the Austrian and the Bourbon, and was now again tearing to pieces the Italy that so many brave men had died to make?

The priests!—the Church!—Why!—she wondered, as she read the story of Charles Albert, and Metternich and the Naples Bourbons, that Italy still dared to let the ignorant, persecuting brood live and thrive in her midst at all! Especially was it a marvel to her that any Jesuit might still walk Italian streets, that a nation could ever forgive or forget such crimes against her inmost life as had been the crimes of the Jesuits. She would stand at the end of the terrace, her hands behind her clasping her book, her eyes fixed on the distant dome amid the stone-pines. Her book opened with the experiences of a Neapolitan boy at school in Naples during the priest-ridden years of the twenties, when Austrian bayonets, after the rising of '21, had replaced Bourbons and Jesuits in power, and crushed the life out of the young striving liberty of '21, as a cruel boy may crush and strangle a fledgling bird. 'What did we learn,' cried the author of the memoir—'from that monkish education which dwarfed both our mind and body? How many have I seen in later life groaning over their own ignorance, and pouring maledictions on the seminary or the college, where they had wasted so many years and had learnt nothing!'

'That monkish education which dwarfed both our mind and body'—

Lucy would repeat the words to herself—throwing them out as a challenge to that great dome hovering amid the sunny haze. That old man there, among his Cardinals—she thought of him with a young horror and revolt; yet not without a certain tremor of the imagination. Well!—in a few days—Sunday week—she was to see him, and judge for herself.

* * * * *

Meanwhile visitors were almost shut out. The villa sank into a convent-like quiet; for in a week, ten days, the book was perhaps to be finished. Miss Manisty, as the crisis approached, kept a vigilant eye on Mrs. Burgoyne. She was in constant dread of a delicate woman's collapse; and after the sittings in the library had lasted a certain time she had now the courage to break in upon them, and drive Manisty's Egeria out of her cave to rest and to the garden.

So Lucy, as the shadows lengthened in the garden, would hear the sound of a light though languid step, and would look up to see a delicate white face smiling down upon her.

'Oh! how tired you must be!' she would say, springing up. 'Let me make a place for you here under the trees.'

'No, no. Let us move about. I am tired of sitting.'

And they would pace up and down the terrace and the olive-garden beyond, while Mrs. Burgoyne leant upon Lucy's arm, chatting and laughing with an evident relief from tension which only betrayed the mental and physical fatigue behind.

Lucy wondered to see how exquisite, how dainty, she would emerge from these wrestles with hard work. Her fresh white or pale dresses, the few jewels half-hidden at her wrists or throat, the curled or piled masses of the fair hair, were never less than perfection, it seemed to Lucy; she was never more the woman of fashion and the great world than when she came out from a morning's toil that would have left its disturbing mark on a strong man, her eyes shining under the stress and ardour of those 'ideas,' as to which it was good to talk with her.

But how eagerly she would throw off that stress, and turn to wooing and winning Lucy Foster! All hanging back in the matter was gone. Certain vague thoughts and terrors were laid to sleep, and she must needs allow herself the luxury of charming the quiet girl, like all the rest—the dogs, the servants or the village children. There was a perpetual hunger for love in Eleanor's nature which expressed itself in a thousand small and piteous ways. She could never help throwing out tendrils, and it was rarely that she ventured them in vain.

In the case of Lucy Foster, however, her fine tact soon discovered that caresses were best left alone. They were natural to herself, and once or twice as the April days went by, she ventured to kiss the girl's fresh cheek, or to slip an arm round her waist. But Lucy took it awkwardly. When she was kissed she flushed, and stood passive; and all her personal ways were a little stiff and austere. After one of these demonstrations indeed Mrs. Burgoyne generally found herself repaid in some other form, by some small thoughtfulness on Lucy's part—the placing of a stool, the fetching of a cloak—or merely perhaps by a new softness in the girl's open look. And Eleanor never once thought of resenting her lack of response. There was even a kind of charm in it. The prevailing American type in Rome that winter had been a demonstrative type.

Lucy's manner in comparison was like a cool and bracing air. 'And when she does kiss!' Eleanor would say to herself—'it will be with all her heart. One can see that.'

Meanwhile Mrs. Burgoyne took occasional note of the Mazzinian literature that lay about. She would turn the books over and read their titles, her eyes sparkling with a little gentle mischief, as she divined the girl's disapproval of her host and his views. But she never argued with Lucy. She was too tired of the subject, too eager to seek relief in talking of the birds and the view, of people and chiffons.

Too happy perhaps—also. She walked on air in these days before Easter. The book was prospering; Manisty was more content; and as agreeable in all daily ways and offices as only the hope of good fortune can make a man. 'The Priest of Nemi'—indeed, with several other prose poems of the same kind, had been cast out of the text; which now presented one firm and vigorous whole of social and political discussion. But the Nemi piece was to be specially bound for Eleanor, together with some drawings that she had made of the lake and the temple site earlier in the spring. And on the day the book was finished—somewhere within the next fortnight—there was to be a festal journey to Nemi—divine and blessed place!

So she felt no fatigue, and was always ready to chatter to Lucy of the most womanish things. Especially, as the girl's beauty grew upon her, was she anxious to carry out those plans of transforming her dress and hair,—her gowns and hats and shoes—the primness of her brown braids, which she and Miss Manisty had confided to each other.

But Lucy was shy—would not be drawn that way. There were fewer visitors at the villa than she had expected. For this quiet life in the garden, and on the country roads, it seemed to her that her dresses did very well. The sense of discomfort excited by the elegance of her Florentine acquaintance died away. And she would have thought it wrong and extravagant to spend unnecessary money.

So she had quietly ceased to think about her dress; and the blue and white check, to Eleanor's torment, had frequently to be borne with.

Even the promised invitation to the Embassy had not arrived. It was said that the Ambassador's daughter had gone to Florence. Only Lucy wished she had not written that letter to Uncle Ben from Florence:—that rather troubled and penitent letter on the subject of dress. He might misunderstand—might do something foolish.

* * * * *

And apparently Uncle Ben did do something foolish. For a certain letter arrived from Boston on the day after the seminarists' invasion of the garden. Lucy after an hour's qualms and hesitations, must needs reluctantly confide the contents of it to Miss Manisty. And that lady with smiles and evident pleasure called Mrs. Burgoyne—and Eleanor called her maid,—and the ball began to roll.

* * * * *

On Saturday morning early, Mrs. Burgoyne's room indeed was in a bustle—delightful to all but Lucy. Manisty was in Rome for the day, and Eleanor had holiday. She had never looked more frail—a rose-leaf pink in her cheek—nor more at ease. For she was at least as good to consult about a skirt as an idea.

'Marie!'—she said, giving her own maid a little peremptory push—'just run and fetch Benson—there's an angel. We must have all the brains possible. If we don't get the bodice right, it won't suit Miss Foster a bit.'

Marie went in all haste. Meanwhile in front of a large glass stood a rather red and troubled Lucy arrayed in a Paris gown belonging to Mrs. Burgoyne. Eleanor had played her with much tact, and now had her in her power.

'It is the crisis, my dear,' Miss Manisty had said in Eleanor's ear, as they rose from breakfast, with a twinkle of her small eyes. 'The question is; can we, or can we not, turn her into a beauty? You can!'

Eleanor at any rate was doing her best. She had brought out her newest gowns and Lucy was submissively putting them on one after the other. Eleanor was in pursuit first of all of some general conceptions. What was the girl's true style?—what were the possibilities?

'When I have got my lines and main ideas in my head,' she said pensively, 'then we will call in the maids. Of course you might have the things made in Rome. But as we have the models—and these two maids have nothing to do—why not give ourselves the pleasure of looking after it?'

Pleasure! Lucy Foster opened her eyes.

Still, here was this absurd, this most extravagant cheque from Uncle Ben, and these peremptory commands to get herself everything—everything—that other girls had. Why, it was demanded of her, had she been economical and scrupulous before starting? Folly and disobedience! He had been told of her silly hesitations, her detestable frugalities—he had ferretted it all out. And now she was at a disadvantage—was she? Let her provide herself at once, or old as he was, he would take train and steamer and come and see to it!

She was not submissive in general—far from it. But the reading of Uncle
Ben's letter had left her very meek in spirit and rather inclined to cry.

Had Uncle Ben really considered whether it was right to spend so much money on oneself, to think so much about it? Their life together had been so simple, the question had hardly emerged. Of course it was right to be neat and fresh, and to please his taste in what she wore. But—

The net result of all this internal debate, however, was to give a peculiar charm, like the charm of rippled and sensitive water, to features that were generally too still and grave. She stood silently before the long glass while Mrs. Burgoyne and the maids talked and pinned. She walked to the end of the room and back, as she was bid; she tried to express a preference, when she was asked for one; and as she was arrayed in one delicious gown after another, she became more and more alive to the beauty of the soft stuffs, the invention and caprice with which they were combined, the daintiness of their pinks and blues, their greys and creams, their lilacs and ivories. At last Mrs. Burgoyne happened upon a dress of white crape, opening upon a vest of pale green, with thin edges of black here and there, disposed with the tact, the feeling of the artist; and when Lucy's tall form had been draped in this garment, her three attendants fell back with one simultaneous cry:

'Oh my dear!' said Mrs. Burgoyne drawing a long breath.—'Now you see, Marie—I told you!—that's the cut. And just look how simple that is, and how it falls! That's the green. Yes, when Mathilde is as good as that she's divine.—Now all you've got to do is just to copy that. And the materials are just nothing—you'll get them in the Corso in half-an-hour.'

'May I take it off?' said Lucy.

'Well yes, you may'—said Mrs. Burgoyne, reluctantly—'but it's a great pity. Well now, for the coat and skirt,'—she checked them off on her slim fingers—'for the afternoon gown, and one evening dress, I think I see my way—'

'Enough for one morning isn't it?' said Lucy half laughing, half imploring.

'Yes,'—said Mrs. Burgoyne absently, her mind already full of further developments.

The gowns were carried away, and Aunt Pattie's maid departed. Then as Lucy in her white cotton wrapper was retiring to her own room, Mrs. Burgoyne caught her by the arm.

'You remember,'—she said appealingly,—'how rude I was that evening you came—how I just altered your hair? You don't know how I long to do it properly! You know I shall have a little trouble with these dresses—trouble I like—but still I shall pretend it's trouble, that you may pay me for it. Pay me by letting me experiment! I just long to take all your hair down, and do it as it ought to be done. And you don't know how clever I am. Let me!'

And already, before the shamefaced girl could reply, she was gently pushed into the chair before Mrs. Burgoyne's dressing-table, and a pair of skilled hands went to work.

'I can't say you look as though you enjoyed it,' said Mrs. Burgoyne by the time she had covered the girl's shoulders with the long silky veil which she had released from the stiff plaits confining it. 'Do you think it's wrong to do your hair prettily?' Lucy laughed uneasily.

'I was never brought up to think much about it. My mother had very strict views.'

'Ah!'—said Eleanor, with a discreet intonation. 'But you see, at Rome it is really so much better for the character to do as Rome does. To be out of the way makes one self-conscious. Your mother didn't foresee that.'

Silence,—while the swift white fingers plaited and tied and laid foundations.

'It waves charmingly already'—murmured the artist—'but it must be just a little more ondulé in the right places—just a touch—here and there. Quick, Marie!—bring me the stove—and the tongs—and two or three of those finest hairpins.'

The maid flew, infected by the ardour of her mistress, and between them they worked to such purpose that when at last they released their victim, they had turned the dark head into that of a stately and fashionable beauty. The splendid hair was raised high in small silky ripples above the white brow. The little love-locks on the temples had been delicately arranged so as to complete the fine oval of the face, and at the back the black masses drawn lightly upwards from the neck, and held in place there by a pearl comb of Mrs. Burgoyne's, had been piled and twisted into a crown that would have made Artemis herself more queenly.

'Am I really to keep it like this?' cried Lucy, looking at herself in the glass.

'But of course you are!' and Mrs. Burgoyne instinctively held the girl's arms, lest any violence should be offered to her handiwork—'And you must put on your old white frock—not the check—the nice soft one that's been washed, with the pink sash—Goodness, how the time goes! Marie, run and tell Miss Manisty not to wait for me—I'll follow her to the village.'

The maid went. Lucy looked down upon her tyrant—

You are very kind to me'—she said with a lip that trembled slightly. Her blue eyes under the black brows showed a feeling that she did not know how to express. The subdued responsiveness, indeed, of Lucy's face was like that of Wordsworth's Highland girl struggling with English. You felt her 'beating up against the wind,'—in the current, yet resisting it. Or to take another comparison, her nature seemed to be at once stiff and rich—like some heavy church stuff, shot with gold.

'Oh! these things are my snare,' said Eleanor, laughing—'If I have any gift, it is for chiffons.'

'Any gift!' said Lucy wondering—'when you do so much for Mr. Manisty?'

Mrs. Burgoyne shrugged her shoulders.

'Ah! well—he wanted a secretary—and I happened to get the place,' she said, in a more constrained voice.

'Miss Manisty told me how you helped him in the winter. And she and Mr.
Brooklyn—have—told me—other things—' said Lucy. She paused, colouring
deeply. But her eyes travelled timidly to the photographs on Mrs.
Burgoyne's table.

Eleanor understood.

'Ah!—they told you that, did they?'—The speaker turned a little white. 'And you wonder—don't you?—that I can go on talking about frocks, and new ways of doing one's hair?'

She moved away from Lucy, a touch of cold defensive dignity effacing all her pliant sweetness.

Lucy followed and caught her hand.

'Oh no! no!'—she said—'it is only so brave and good of you—to be able still—to take an interest—'

'Do I take it?' said Eleanor, scornfully, raising her other hand and letting it fall.

Lucy was silenced. After a moment Eleanor looked round, calmly took the photograph of the child from the table, and held it towards Lucy.

'He was just two—his birthday was four days before this was taken. It's the picture I love best, because I last saw him like that—in his night-gown. I was very ill that night—they wouldn't let me stay with my husband—but after I left him, I came and rocked the baby and tucked him up—and leant my face against his. He was so warm and sweet always in his sleep. The touch of him—and the scent of him—his dear breath—and his curls—and the moist little hands—sometimes they used to intoxicate me—to give me life—like wine. They did me such good—that night.'

Her voice did not tremble. Tears softly found their way down Lucy's face.
And suddenly she stooped, and put her lips, tenderly, clingingly, to Mrs.
Burgoyne's hand.

Eleanor smiled. Then she herself bent forward and lightly kissed the girl's cheek.

'Oh! I am not worthy either to have had him—or lost him—' she said bitterly. There was a little pause, which Eleanor broke. 'Now really we must go to Aunt Pattie—mustn't we?'

CHAPTER VI

'Ah! here you are! Don't kill yourselves. Plenty of time—for us!
Listen—there's the bell—eight o'clock—now they open the doors.
Goodness!—Look at the rush—and those little Italian chaps tackling those
strapping priests. Go it, ye cripples!'

Lucy tamed her run to a quick walk, and Mr. Reggie took care of her, while Manisty disappeared ahead with Mrs. Burgoyne, and Aunt Pattie fell to the share of a certain Mr. Vanbrugh Neal, an elderly man tall and slim, and of a singular elegance of bearing, who had joined them at the Piazza, and seemed to be an old friend of Mr. Manisty's.

Lucy looked round her in bewilderment. Before the first stroke of the bell the Piazza of St. Peter's had been thickly covered with freely moving groups, all advancing in order upon the steps of the church. But as the bell began to speak, there was a sudden charge mostly of young priests and seminarists—black skirts flying, black legs leaping—across the open space and up the steps.

'Reminds me of nothing so much'—said Reggie laughing back over his shoulder at a friend behind—'as the charge of the Harrow boys at Lord's last year—when they stormed the pavilion—did you see it?—and that little Harrow chap saved the draw? I say!—they've broken the line!—and there'll be a bad squash somewhere.'

And indeed the attacking priests had for a moment borne down the Italian soldiers who were good-naturedly guarding and guiding the Pope's guests from the entrance of the Piazza to the very door of the church. But the little men—as they seemed to Lucy's eyes—recovered themselves in a twinkling, threw themselves stoutly on the black gentry, like sheep dogs on the sheep, worried them back into line, collared a few bold spirits here, formed a new cordon there, till all was once more in tolerable order, and a dangerous pressure on the central door was averted.

Meanwhile Lucy was hurried forward with the privileged crowd going to the tribunes, towards the sacristy door on the south.

'Let's catch up Mrs. Burgoyne'—said the young man, looking ahead with some anxiety—'Manisty's no use. He'll begin to moon and forget all about her. I say!—Look at the building—and the sky behind it! Isn't it stunning?'

And they threw up a hasty glance as they sped along at the superb walls and apses and cornices of the southern side—golden ivory or wax against the blue.—The pigeons flew in white eddies above their heads; the April wind flushed Lucy's cheek, and played with her black mantilla. All qualms were gone. After her days of seclusion in the villa garden, she was passionately conscious of this great Rome and its magic; and under her demure and rather stately air, her young spirits danced and throbbed with pleasure.

'How that black lace stuff does become all you women!'—said Reggie Brooklyn, throwing a lordly and approving glance at her and his cousin Eleanor, as they all met and paused amid the crowd that was concentrating itself on the sacristy door; and Lucy, instead of laughing at the lad's airs, only reddened a little more brightly and found it somehow sweet—April sweet—that a young man on this spring morning should admire her; though after all, she was hardly more inclined to fall in love with Reggie Brooklyn than with Manisty's dear collie puppy, that had been left behind, wailing, at the villa.

At the actual door the young man quietly possessed himself of Mrs.
Burgoyne, while Manisty with an unconscious look of relief fell behind.

'And you, Miss Foster,—keep closer—my coat's all at your service—it'll stand a pull. Don't you be swept away—and I'll answer for Mrs. Burgoyne.'

So on they hurried, borne along with the human current through passages and corridors, part of a laughing, pushing, chatting crowd, containing all the types that throng the Roman streets—English and American tourists, Irish or German or English priests, monks white and brown, tall girls who wore their black veils with an evident delight in the new setting thus given to their fair hair and brilliant skins, beside older women to whom, on the contrary, the dress had given a kind of unwonted repose and quietness of look, as though for once they dared to be themselves in it, and gave up the struggle with the years.

Reggie Brooklyn maintained a lively chatter all the time, mostly at Manisty's expense. Eleanor Burgoyne first laughed at his sallies, then gently turned her head in a pause of the general advance and searched the crowd pressing at their heels. Lucy's eyes followed hers, and there far behind, carried forward passively in a brown study, losing ground slightly whenever it was possible, was Manisty. The fine significant face was turned a little upward; the eyes were full of thoughts; he was at once the slave of the crowd, and its master.

And across Eleanor's expression—unseen—there passed the slightest, subtlest flash of tenderness and pride. She knew and understood him—she alone!

* * * * *

At last the doors are passed. They are in the vast barricaded and partitioned space, already humming with the talk and tread of thousands,—the 'Tu es Petrus' overhead. Reggie Brooklyn would have hurried them on in the general rush for the tribunes. But Mrs. Burgoyne laid a restraining hand upon him. 'No—we mustn't separate,' she said, gently peremptory. And for a few minutes Mr. Reggie in an anguish must needs see the crowd flow past him, and the first seats of Tribune D filled. Then Manisty appeared, lifting his eyebrows in a frowning wonder at the young man's impatience;—and on they flew.

At last!—They are in the third row of Tribune D, close to the line by which the Pope must pass, and to the platform from which he will deliver the Apostolic Benediction. Reggie the unsatisfied, the idealist, grumbles that they ought to have been in the very front. But Eleanor and Aunt Pattie are well satisfied. They find their acquaintance all around them. It is a general flutter of fans, and murmur of talk. Already people are standing on their seats looking down on the rapidly filling church. In press the less favoured thousands from the Piazza, through the Atrium and the Eastern door—great sea of human life spreading over the illimitable nave behind the two lines of Swiss and Papal Guards, in quick never-ending waves that bewilder and dazzle the eye.

Lucy found the three hours' wait but a moment. The passing and re-passing of the splendid officials in their Tudor or Valois dress; the great names, 'Colonna,' 'Barberini,' 'Savelli,' 'Borghese' that sound about her, as Mrs. Burgoyne who knows everybody, at least by sight, laughs and points and chats with her neighbour, Mr. Neal; the constant welling up of processions from behind,—the Canons and Monsignori in their fur and lace tippets, the red Cardinals with their suites; the entry of the Guardia Nobile, splendid, incredible, in their winged Achillean helmets above their Empire uniforms—half Greek, half French, half gods, half dandies, the costliest foolishest plaything that any court can show; and finally as the time draws on, the sudden thrills and murmurs that run through the church, announcing the great moment which still, after all, delays: these things chase the minutes, blot out, the sense of time.

Meanwhile, again and again, Lucy, the sedate, the self-controlled, cannot prevent herself from obeying a common impulse with those about her—from leaping on her chair—straining her white throat—her eyes. Then a handsome chamberlain would come by, lifting a hand in gentle protest, motioning to the ladies—'De grâce, mesdames—mesdames, de grâce!—' Or angry murmurs would rise from those few who had not the courage or the agility to mount—'Giù! giù!—Descendez, mesdames!—qu'est-ce que c'est done que ces mánières?'—and Lucy, crimson and abashed, would descend in haste, only to find a kind Irish priest behind smiling at her,—prompting her,—'Never mind them!—take no notice!—who is it you're harmin'?'—And her excitement would take him at his word—for who should know if not a priest?

And from these risky heights she looked down sometimes on Manisty—wondering where was emotion, sympathy. Not a trace of them! Of all their party he alone was obviously and hideously bored by the long wait. He leant back in his chair, with folded arms, staring at the ceiling—yawning—fidgetting. At last he took out a small Greek book from his pocket, and hung over it in a moody absorption. Once only, when a procession of the inferior clergy went by, he looked at it closely, turning afterwards to Mrs. Burgoyne with the emphatic remark: 'Bad faces!—aren't they?—almost all of them?'

Yet Lucy could see that even here in this vast crowd, amid the hubbub and bustle, he still counted, was still remembered. Officials came to lean and chat across the rope; diplomats stopped to greet him on the way to the august seats beyond the Confession. His manner in return showed no particular cordiality; Lucy thought it languid, even cold. She was struck with the difference between his mood of the day, and that brilliant and eager homage he had lavished on the old Cardinal in the villa garden. What a man of change and fantasy! Here it was he qui tendait la joue. Cold, distant, dreamy—one would have thought him either indifferent or hostile to the whole great pageant and its meanings.

Only once did Lucy see him bestir himself—show a gleam of animation. A white-haired priest, all tremulous dignity and delicacy, stood for a moment beside the rope-barrier, waiting for a friend. Manisty bent over and touched him on the arm. The old man turned. The face was parchment, the cheeks cavernous. But in the blue eyes there was an exquisite innocence and youth.

Manisty smiled at him. His manner showed a peculiar almost a boyish deference. 'You join us afterwards—at lunch?'

'Yes, yes.' The old priest beamed and nodded; then his friend came up and he was carried on.

* * * * *

'A quarter to eleven,' said Manisty with a yawn, looking at his watch.
'Ah!—listen!'

He sprang to his feet. In an instant half the occupants of Tribune D were on their chairs, Lucy and Eleanor among them. A roar came up the church—passionate—indescribable. Lucy held her breath.

There—there he is,—the old man! Caught in a great shaft of sunlight striking from south to north, across the church, and just touching the chapel of the Holy Sacrament—the Pope emerges. The white figure, high above the crowd, sways from side to side; the hand upraised gives the benediction. Fragile, spiritual as is the apparition, the sunbeam refines, subtilises, spiritualises it still more. It hovers like a dream above the vast multitudes—surely no living man!—but thought, history, faith, taking shape; the passion of many hearts revealed. Up rushes the roar towards the Tribunes. 'Did you hear?' said Manisty to Mrs. Burgoyne, lifting a smiling brow, as a few Papalino cries—'Viva il Papa Re'—make themselves heard among the rest. Eleanor's thin face turns to him with responsive excitement. But she has seen these things before. Instinctively her eyes wander perpetually to Manisty's, taking their colour, their meaning from his. It is not the spectacle itself that matters to her—poor Eleanor! One heart-beat, one smile of the man beside her outweighs it all. And he, roused at last from his nonchalance, watching hawk-like every movement of the figure and the crowd, is going mentally through a certain page of his book, repeating certain phrases—correcting here—strengthening there.

Lucy alone—the alien and Puritan Lucy—Lucy surrenders herself completely. She betrays nothing, save by the slightly parted lips, and the flutter of the black veil fastened on her breast; but it is as though her whole inner being were dissolving, melting away, in the flame of the moment. It is her first contact with decisive central things, her first taste of the great world-play, as Europe has known it and taken part in it, at least since Charles the Great.

Yet, as she looks, within the visible scene, there opens another: the porch of a plain, shingled house, her uncle sitting within it, his pipe and his newspaper on his knee, sunning himself in the April morning. She passes behind him, looks into the stiff leaf-scented parlour—at the framed Declaration of Independence on the walls, the fresh boughs in the fire-place, the Bible on its table, the rag-carpet before the hearth. She breathes the atmosphere of the house; its stern independence and simplicities; the scorns and the denials, the sturdy freedoms both of body and soul that it implies—conscience the only master—vice-master for God, in this His house of the World. And beyond—as her lids sink for an instant on the pageant before her—she hears, as it were, the voices of her country, so young and raw and strong!—she feels within her the throb of its struggling self-assertive life; she is conscious too of the uglinesses and meannesses that belong to birth and newness, to growth and fermentation. Then, in a proud timidity—as one who feels herself an alien and on sufferance—she hangs again upon the incomparable scene. This is St. Peter's; there is the dome of Michael Angelo; and here, advancing towards her amid the red of the cardinals, the clatter of the guards, the tossing of the flabellæ, as though looking at her alone—the two waxen fingers raised for her alone—is the white-robed triple-crowned Pope.

She threw herself upon the sight with passion, trying to penetrate and possess it; and it baffled her, passed her by. Some force of resistance within her cried out to it that she was not its subject—rather its enemy! And august, unheeding, the great pageant swept on. Close, close to her now! Down sink the crowd upon the chairs; the heads fall like corn before the wind. Lucy is bending too. The Papal chair borne on the shoulders of the guards is now but a few feet distant; vaguely she wonders that the old man keeps his balance, as he clings with one frail hand to the arm of the chair, rises incessantly—and blesses with the other. She catches the very look and meaning of the eyes—the sharp long line of the closed and toothless jaw. Spirit and spectre;—embodying the Past, bearing the clue to the Future.

'Yeux de police!'—laughed Reggie Brooklyn to Mrs. Burgoyne as the procession passed—'don't you know?—that's what they say.'

Manisty bent forward. The flush of excitement was still on his cheek, but he threw a little nod to Brooklyn, whose gibe amused him.

Lucy drew a long breath—and the spell was broken.

* * * * *

Nor was it again renewed, in the same way. The Pope and his cortège disappeared behind the Confession, behind the High Altar, and presently, Lucy, craning her neck to the right, could see dimly in the furthest distance, against the apse, and under the chair of St. Peter, the chair of Leo XIII. and the white shadow, motionless, erect, within it, amid a court of cardinals and diplomats. As for the mass that followed, it had its moments of beauty for the girl's wondering or shrinking curiosity, but also its moments of weariness and disillusion. From the latticed choir-gallery, placed against one of the great piers of the dome, came unaccompanied music—fine, pliant, expressive—like a single voice moving freely in the vast space; and at the High Altar, Cardinals and Bishops crossed and recrossed, knelt and rose, offered and put off the mitre; amid wreaths of incense, long silences, a few chanted words; sustained, enfolded all the while by the swelling tide of Gloria, or Sanctus.

At last—the elevation!—and at the bell the whole long double line of soldiers, from the Pope's chair at the western end to the eastern door, with a rattle of arms that ran from end to end of the church, dropped on one knee—saluted. Then, crac!—and as they had dropped, they rose, the stiff white breeches and towering helmets of the Guardia Nobile, the red and yellow of the Swiss, the red and blue of the Papal guards—all motionless as before. It was like the movement of some gigantic toy. And who or what else took any notice? Lucy looked round amazed. Even the Irish priest behind her had scarcely bowed his head. Nobody knelt. Most people were talking. Eleanor Burgoyne indeed had covered her face with her long delicate fingers. Manisty leaning back in his chair, looked up for an instant at the rattle of the soldiers, then went back sleepily to his Greek book. Yet Lucy felt her own heart throbbing. Through the candelabra of the High Altar beneath the dome, she can see the moving figures of the priests, the wreaths of incense ascending. The face of the celebrant Cardinal, which had dropped out of sight, reappears. Since it was last visible, according to Catholic faith, the great act of Catholic worship has been accomplished—the Body and Blood are there—God has descended, has mingled with a mortal frame. And who cares? Lucy looks round her at the good-humoured indifference, vacancy, curiosity, of the great multitude filling the nave; and her soul frees itself in a rush of protesting amazement.

* * * * *

One more 'moment' however there was,—very different from the great moment of the entry, yet beautiful. The mass is over, and a temporary platform has been erected between the Confession and the nave. The Pope has been placed upon it, and is about to chant the Apostolic Benediction.

The old man is within thirty feet of Manisty, who sits nearest to the barrier. The red Cardinal holding the service-book, the groups of guards, clergy and high officials, every detail of the Pope's gorgeous dress, nay every line of the wrinkled face, and fleshless hands, Lucy's eyes command them all. The quavering voice rises into the sudden silence of St. Peter's. Fifty thousand people hush every movement, strain their ears to listen.

Ah! how weak it is! Surely the effort is too great for a frame so enfeebled, so ancient. It should not have been exacted—allowed. Lucy's ears listen painfully for the inevitable break. But no!—The Pope draws a long sigh—the sigh of weakness,—('Ah! poveretto!' says a woman, close to Lucy, in a transport of pity),—then once more attempts the chant—sighs again—and sings. Lucy's face softens and glows; her eyes fill with tears. Nothing more touching, more triumphant, than this weakness and this perseverance. Fragile indomitable face beneath the Papal crown! Under the eyes of fifty thousand people the Pope sighs like a child, because he is weak and old, and the burden of his office is great; but in sighing, keeps a perfect simplicity, dignity, courage. Not a trace of stoical concealment; but also not a trace of flinching. He sings to the end, and St. Peter's listens in a tender hush.

Then there seems to be a moment of collapse. The long straight lips close as though with a snap, the upper jaw protruding; the eyelids drop; the emaciated form sinks upon itself.—

But his guards raise the chair, and the Pope's trance passes away. He opens his eyes, and braces himself for the last effort. Whiter than the gorgeous cope which falls about him, he raises himself, clinging to the chair; he lifts the skeleton fingers of his partially gloved hand; his look searches the crowd.

Lucy fell on her knees, a sob in her throat. When the Pope had passed, some influence made her look up. She met the eyes of Edward Manisty. They were instantly withdrawn, but not before the mingling of amusement and triumph in them had brought the quick red to the girl's cheek.

* * * * *

And outside, in the Piazza, amid the out-pouring thousands, as they were rushing for their carriage, Manisty's stride overtook her.

'Well—you were impressed?'—he said, looking at her sharply.

The girl's pride was somehow nettled by his tone.

'Yes—but by the old man—more than by the Pope,'—she said quickly.

'I hope not,' he said, with emphasis.—'Otherwise you would have missed the whole point.'

'Why?—Mayn't one feel it was pathetic, and touching—'

'No—not in the least!' he said, impatiently. 'What does the man himself matter, or his age?—That's all irrelevant,—foolish sentiment. What makes these ceremonies so tremendous is that there is no break between that man and Peter—or Linus, if you like—it comes to the same thing:—that the bones, if not of Peter, at any rate of men who might have known Peter, are there, mingled with the earth beneath his feet—that he stands there recognised by half the civilised world as Peter's successor—that five hundred, a thousand years hence, the vast probability is there will still be a Pope in St. Peter's to hand on the same traditions, and make the same claims.'

'But if you don't acknowledge the tradition or the claims!—why shouldn't you feel just the human interest?'

'Oh, of course, if you want to take the mere vulgar, parochial view—the halfpenny interviewer's view—why, you must take it!' he said, almost with violence, shrugging his shoulders.

Lucy's eyes sparkled. There was always something of the overgrown, provoking child in him, when he wanted to bear down an opinion or feeling that displeased him. She would have liked to go on walking and wrangling with him, for the great ceremony had excited her, and made it easier for her to talk. But at that moment Mrs. Burgoyne's voice was heard in front—'Joy! there is the carriage, and Reggie has picked up another.—Edward, take Aunt Pattie through—we'll look after ourselves.'

* * * * *

And soon the whole party were driving in two of the little Roman victorias through streets at the back of the Capitol, and round the base of the Palatine, to the Aventine, where it appeared they were to lunch at an open-air trattoria, recommended by Mr. Brooklyn.

Mrs. Burgoyne, Lucy and Mr. Vanbrugh Neal found themselves together. Mrs. Burgoyne and Mr. Neal talked of the function, and Lucy, after a few shy expressions of gratitude and pleasure, fell silent, and listened. But she noticed very soon that Mrs. Burgoyne was talking absently. Amid the black that fell about her slim tallness, she was more fragile, more pale than ever; and it seemed to Lucy that her eyes were dark with a fatigue that had not much to do with St. Peter's. Suddenly indeed, she bent forward and said in a lowered voice to Mr. Neal—

'You have read it?'

He too bent forward, with a smile not quite free from embarrassment—

'Yes, I have read it—I shall have some criticisms to make.—You won't mind?'

She threw up her hands—

'Must you?'

'I think I must—for the good of the book,'—he said reluctantly. 'Very likely I'm all wrong. I can only look at it as one of the public. But that's what he wants,'—what you both want—isn't it?'

She assented. Then she turned her head away, looked out of the carriage and said no more. But her face had drooped and dimmed, all in a moment; the lines graven in it long years before, by grief and delicacy, came out with a singular and sudden plainness.

The man sitting opposite to her was of an aspect little less distinguished than hers. He had a long face, with a high forehead, set in grizzled hair, and a mouth and chin of peculiar refinement. The shortness of the chin gave a first impression of weakness, which however was soon undone by the very subtle and decided lines in which, so to speak, the mouth, and indeed the face as a whole, were drawn. All that Lucy knew of him was that he was a Cambridge don, a man versed in classical archæology who was an old friend and tutor of Mr. Manisty's. She had heard his name mentioned several times at the Villa, and always with an emphasis that marked it out from other names. And she understood from various signs that before finally passing his proofs for publication, Mr. Manisty had taken advantage of his old friend's coming to Rome to ask his opinion on them.

How brilliant was the April day on the high terrace of the Aventine trattoria! As Lucy and Aunt Pattie stood together beside the little parapet looking out through the sprays of banksia rose that were already making a white canopy above the restaurant tables, they had before them the steep sides and Imperial ruins of the Palatine; the wonderful group of churches on the Coelian; the low villa-covered ridges to the right melting into the Campagna; and far away, the blue, Sabine mountains—'suffused with sunny air'—that look down with equal kindness on the refuge of Horace, and the oratory of St. Benedict. What sharpness of wall and tree against the pearly sky—what radiance of blossom in the neighbouring gardens—what ruin everywhere, yet what indomitable life!

Beneath on a lower terrace, Manisty and Mr. Vanbrugh Neal were walking up and down.

'He's such a clever man,' sighed Aunt Pattie, as she looked down upon them.
'But I do hope he won't discourage Edward.'

Whereupon she glanced not at Manisty but at Eleanor, who was sitting near them, pretending to talk to Reggie Brooklyn—but in reality watching the conversation below.

Presently some other guests arrived, and amongst them the tall and fine-faced priest who had spoken to Manisty in St. Peter's. He came in very shyly. Eleanor Burgoyne received him, made him sit by her, and took charge of him till Manisty should appear. But he seemed to be ill at ease with ladies. He buried his hands in the sleeves of his soutane, and would answer little more than Yes and No.

'There'll be a great fuss about him soon,' whispered Aunt Pattie in Lucy's ear—'I don't quite understand—but he's written a book that's been condemned; and the question is, will he submit? They give you a year apparently to decide in. Edward says the book's quite right—and yet they were quite right to condemn him. It's very puzzling!'

When Manisty and Mr. Neal answered to the call of luncheon, Mr. Neal mounted the steps leading to the open-air restaurant, with the somewhat sheepish air of the man who has done his duty, and is inclined to feel himself a meddler for his pains. The luncheon itself passed without gaiety. Manisty was either moodily silent, or engaged in discussions with the strange priest, Father Benecke, as to certain incidents connected with a South German University, which had lately excited Catholic opinion. He scarcely spoke to any of the ladies—least of all to Eleanor Burgoyne. She and Aunt Pattie must needs make all the greater efforts to carry off the festa. Aunt Pattie chattered nervously like one in dread of a silence, while Eleanor was merry with young Brooklyn, and courteous to the other guests whom Manisty had invited—a distinguished French journalist for instance, an English member of Parliament and his daughter, and an Italian senator with an English wife.

Nevertheless when the party was breaking up, Reggie who had thrown her occasional glances of disquiet, approached Lucy Foster and said to her in a low voice, twirling an angry moustache—

'Mrs. Burgoyne is worn out. Can't you look after her?'

Lucy, a little scared by so much responsibility, did her best. She dissuaded Aunt Pattie from dragging Mrs. Burgoyne through an afternoon of visits. She secured an early train for the return to Marinata, and so earned a special and approving smile from Mr. Reggie, when at last he had settled the three ladies safely in their carriage, and was raising his hat to them on the platform. Manisty and Mr. Neal were to follow by a later train.

No sooner were they speeding through the Campagna than Eleanor sank back in her corner with a long involuntary sigh.

'My dear—you are very tired!'—exclaimed Miss Manisty.

'No.—'

Mrs. Burgoyne took off the hat which had by now replaced the black veil of the morning, and closed her eyes. Her attitude by its sad unresistingness appealed to Lucy as it had done once before. And it was borne in upon her that what she saw was not mere physical fatigue, but a deep discouragement of mind and heart. As to the true sources of it Lucy could only guess. She guessed at any rate that they were somehow connected with Mr. Manisty and his book; and she was indignant again—she hardly knew why. The situation suggested to her a great devotion ill-repaid, a friendship, of which the strong tyrannous man took advantage. Why should he behave as though all that happened ill with regard to his book was somehow Mrs. Burgoyne's fault? Claim all her time and strength—overstrain and overwork her—and then make her tacitly responsible if anything went amiss! It was like the petulant selfishness of his character. Miss Manisty ought to interfere!

* * * * *

Dreary days followed at the Villa.

It appeared that Mr. Vanbrugh Neal had indeed raised certain critical objections both to the facts and to the arguments of one whole section of the book, and that Manisty had been unable to resist them. The two men would walk up and down the ilex avenues of the garden for hours together, Mr. Neal gentle, conciliating, but immovable; Manisty violent and excited, but always submitting in the end. He would defend his point of view with obstinacy, with offensiveness even, for an afternoon, and then give way, with absolute suddenness. Lucy learnt with some astonishment that beneath his outward egotism he was really amazingly dependent on the opinions of two or three people, of whom Mr. Neal seemed to be one. This dependence turned out indeed to be even excessive. He would make a hard fight for his own way; but in the end he was determined that what he wrote should please his friends, and please a certain public. At bottom he was a rhetorician writing for this public—the slave of praise, and eager for fame, which made his complete indifference as to what people thought of his actions all the more remarkable. He lived to please himself; he wrote to be read; and he had found reason to trust the instinct of certain friends in this respect, Vanbrugh Neal among them.

To do him justice, indeed, along with his dependence on Vanbrugh Neal's opinion, there seemed to go a rather winning dependence on his affection.

Mr. Neal was apparently a devout Anglican, of a delicate and scrupulous type. His temper was academic, his life solitary; rhetoric left him unmoved, and violence of statement caused him to shiver. To make the State religious was his dearest wish. But he did not forget that to accomplish it you must keep the Church reasonable. A deep, though generally silent enthusiasm for the Anglican Via Media possessed him; and, like the Newman of Oriel, he was inclined to look upon the appearance of Antichrist as coincident with the Council of Trent. In England it seemed to him that persecution of the Church was gratuitous and inexcusable; for the Church had never wronged the State. In Italy, on the contrary, supposing the State had been violent, it could plead the earlier violences of the Church. He did not see how the ugly facts could be denied; nor did a candid unveiling of them displease his Anglican taste.

'You should have made a study—and you have written a pamphlet,' he would say, with that slow shake of the head which showed him inexorable. 'Why have you given yourself to the Jesuits? You were an Englishman and an outsider—enormous advantages! Why have you thrown them away?'

'One must have information!—I merely went to headquarters.'

'You have paid for it too dear. Your book is a plea for superstition!'

Whereupon a flame in Manisty's black eyes, and a burst in honour of superstition, which set the garden paths echoing.

But Neal pushed quietly on; untiring, unappeasable; pointing to a misstatement here, an exaggeration there, till Manisty was in a roar of argument, furious half with his friend, half with himself.

Meanwhile if the writer bore attack hardly, the man of piety found it still harder to endure the praise of piety. When Manisty denounced irresponsible science and free thought, as the enemies of the State, which must live, and can only live by religion; when he asked with disdain 'what reasonable man would nowadays weigh the membership of the Catholic church against an opinion in geology or exegesis'; when he dwelt on the easiness of faith,—which had nothing whatever to do with knowledge, and had, therefore, no quarrel with knowledge; or upon the incomparable social power of religion;—his friend grew restive. And while Manisty, intoxicated with his own phrases, and fluencies, was alternately smoking and declaiming, Neal with his grey hair, his tall spare form, and his air of old-fashioned punctilium, would sit near, fixing the speaker with his pale-blue eyes,—a little threateningly; always ready to shatter an exuberance, to check an oratorical flow by some quick double-edged word that would make Manisty trip and stammer; showing, too, all the time, by his evident shrinking, by certain impregnable reserves, or by the banter that hid a feeling too keen to show itself, how great is the gulf between a literary and a practical Christianity.

Nevertheless, from the whole wrestle two facts emerged:—the pleasure which these very dissimilar men took in each other's society; and that strange ultimate pliancy of Manisty which lay hidden somewhere under all the surge and froth of his vivacious rhetoric. Both were equally surprising to Lucy Foster. How had Manisty ever attached himself to Vanbrugh Neal? For Neal had a large share of the weaknesses of the student and recluse; the failings, that is to say, of a man who had lived much alone, and found himself driven to an old-maidish care of health and nerves, if a delicate physique was to do its work. He had fads; and his fads were often unexpected and disconcerting. One day he would not walk; another day he would not eat; driving was out of the question, and the sun must be avoided like the plague. Then again it was the turn of exercise, cold baths, and hearty fare. It was all done with a grace that made his whims more agreeable than other men's sense. But one might have supposed that such claims on a friend's part would have annoyed a man of Manisty's equally marked but very different peculiarities. Not at all. He was patience and good temper itself on these occasions.

'Isn't he bon enfant?' Mr. Neal said once to Mrs. Burgoyne in Lucy's presence, with a sudden accent of affection and emotion—on some occasion when Manisty had borne the upsetting of a cherished plan for the afternoon with quite remarkable patience.

'He has learnt how to spoil you!' said Eleanor, with a fluttering smile, and an immediate change of subject. Lucy looking up, felt a little pang.

For nothing could he more curious than the change in Manisty's manner towards the most constant of companions and secretaries. He had given up all continuous work at his book; he talked now of indefinite postponement; and it seemed as if with the change of plan Mrs. Burgoyne had dropped out of the matter altogether. He scarcely consulted her indeed; he consulted Mr. Neal. Mr. Neal often, moved by a secret chivalry, would insist upon bringing her in to their counsels; Manisty immediately became unmanageable, silent, and embarrassed. And how characteristic and significant was that embarrassment of his! It was as though he had a grievance against her; which however he could neither formulate for himself nor express to her.

On the other hand—perhaps inevitably—he began to take much more notice of Lucy Foster, and to find talking with her an escape. He presently found it amusing to 'draw' her; and subjects presented themselves in plenty. She was now much less shy; and her secret disapproval gave her tongue. His challenges and her replies became a feature of the day; Miss Manisty and Mr. Neal began to listen with half-checked smiles, to relish the girl's crisp frankness, and the quick sense of fun that dared to show itself now that she was more at home.

'And how improved she is! That's like all the Americans—they're so adaptable,'—Miss Manisty would think, as she watched her nephew in the evenings teasing, sparring, or arguing with Lucy Foster—she so adorably young and fresh, the new and graceful lines of the coiffure that Eleanor had forced upon her, defining the clear oval of the face and framing the large eyes and pure brow. Her hands, perhaps, would be lightly clasped on her white lap, their long fingers playing with some flower she had taken from her belt. The lines of the girlish figure would be full of dignity and strength. She might have been herself the young America, arguing, probing, deciding for herself—refusing to be overawed or brow-beaten by the old Europe.

Eleanor meanwhile was unfailingly gracious both to Lucy and the others, though perhaps the grace had in it sometimes a new note of distance, of that delicate hauteur, which every woman of the world has at command. She gave as much attention as ever—more than ever—to the fashioning of Lucy's dresses; the girl was constantly pricked with compunction and shame on the subject. Who was she, that Mrs. Burgoyne—so elegant and distinguished a person—should waste so much time and thought upon her? But sometimes she could not help seeing that Mrs. Burgoyne was glad of the occupation. Her days had been full to the brim; they were now empty. She said nothing; she took up the new books; she talked to and instructed the maids; but Lucy divined a secret suffering.

* * * * *

One evening, about a week after Mr. Neal's arrival at the Villa, Manisty was more depressed than usual. He had been making some attempts to rearrange a certain section of his book which had fallen especially under the ban of Neal's criticism. He had not been successful; and in the process his discontent with one chapter had spread to several. In talking about the matter to Vanbrugh Neal in the salon after dinner he broke out into some expression of disgust as to the waste of time involved in much of his work of the winter. The two friends were in a corner of the vast room; and Manisty spoke in an undertone. But his voice had the carrying and penetrating power of his personality.

Presently Eleanor Burgoyne rose, and softly approached Miss Manisty. 'Dear Aunt Pattie—don't move'—she said, bending over her—'I am tired and will go to bed.'

Manisty, who had turned at her movement, sprang up, and came to her.

'Eleanor! did we walk you too far this afternoon?'

She smiled, but hardly replied. He busied himself with gathering up her possessions, and lit her candle at the side-table.

As she passed by him to the door, he looked at her furtively for a moment,—hanging his head. Then he pressed her hand, and said so that only she could hear—

'I should have kept my regrets to myself!'

She shook her head, with faint mockery.

'It would be the first time.'

Her hand dropped from his, and she passed out of sight. Manisty walked back to his seat discomfited. He could not defend himself against the charges of secret tyranny and abominable ill-humour that his conscience was pricking him with. He was sorry—he would have liked to tell her so. And yet somehow her very weakness and sweetness, her delicate uncomplainingness seemed only to develope his own small egotisms and pugnacities.

* * * * *

That night—a night of rain and scirocco—Eleanor wrote in her journal—'Will he ever finish the book? Very possibly it has been all a mistake. Yet when he began it, he was in the depths. Whatever happens, it has been his salvation.

'—Surely he will finish it? He cannot forego the effect he is almost sure it will produce. But he will finish it with impatience and disgust; he is out of love with it and all its associations. All that he was talking of to-night represents what I had most share in,—the chapters which brought us most closely together. How happy we were over them! And now, how different!

'It is curious—the animation with which he has begun to talk to Lucy Foster. Pretty child! I like to feel that I have been the fairy god-mother, dressing her for the ball. How little she knows what it means to be talked to by him, to receive courtesies from him,—how many women would like to be in her place. Yet now she is not shy; she has no alarms; she treats him like an equal. If it were not ridiculous, one could be angry.

'She dislikes and criticises him, and he can have no possible understanding of or sympathy with her. But she is a way out of embarrassment. How fastidious and proud he is with women!—malicious too, and wilful. Often I have wished him more generous—more kind.

'… In three weeks the anniversary will be here—the ninth. Why am I still alive? How often have I asked myself that! Where is my place?—who needs me?—My babe, if he still exists, is alone—there. And I still here. If I had only had the courage to rejoin him! The doctors deceived me. They made me think it could not be long. And now I am better—much better. If I were happy I should be quite well.

'How weary seems this Italian spring!—the restlessness of this eternal wind—the hot clouds that roll up from the Campagna. "Que vivre est difficile, ô mon coeur fatigué!"'

CHAPTER VII

'I think it's lovely,' said Lucy in an embarrassed voice. 'And I just don't know how to thank you—indeed I don't.'

She was standing inside the door of Mrs. Burgoyne's room, arrayed in the white crepe gown with the touches of pale green and vivid black that Eleanor had designed for her. Its flowing elegance made her positively a stranger to herself. The two maids moreover who had attired her had been intent upon a complete, an indisputable perfection. Her hat had been carried off and retrimmed, her white gloves, her dainty parasol, the bunch of roses at her belt—everything had been thought for; she had been allowed a voice in nothing. And the result was extraordinary. The day before she had been still a mere fresh-cheeked illustration of those 'moeurs de province' which are to be found all over the world, in Burgundy and Yorkshire no less and no more than in Vermont; to-day she had become what others copy, the best of its kind—the 'fleeting flower' that 'blooms for one day at the summit'—as the maids would no doubt have expressed themselves, had they been acquainted with the works of Mr. Clough.

And thanks to that pliancy of her race, which Miss Manisty had discovered, although she was shy in these new trappings, she was not awkward. She was assimilating her new frocks, as she had already assimilated so many other things, during her weeks at the villa—points of manner, of speech, of mental perspective. Unconsciously she copied Mrs. Burgoyne's movements and voice; she was learning to understand Manisty's paradoxes, and Aunt Pattie's small weaknesses. She was less raw, evidently; yet not less individual. Her provincialisms were dropping away; her character, perhaps, was only emerging.

'Are you pleased with it?' she said timidly, as Mrs. Burgoyne bade her come in, and she advanced towards that lady, who was putting on her own hat before the glass.

Eleanor, with uplifted arms, turned and smiled.—

'Charming! You do one credit!—Is Aunt Pattie better?'

Lucy was conscious of a momentary chill. Mrs. Burgoyne had been so kind and friendly during the whole planning and making of this dress, the girl, perhaps, had inevitably expected a keener interest in its completion.

She answered in some discomfort:—

'I am afraid Miss Manisty's not coming. I saw Benson just now. Her headache is still so bad.'

'Ah!'—said Eleanor, absently, rummaging among her gloves; 'this scirocco weather doesn't suit her.'

Lucy fidgetted a little as she stood by the dressing-table, took up one knick-knack after another and put it down. At last she said—

'Do you mind my asking you a question?'

Mrs. Burgoyne turned in surprise.

'By all means!—What can I do?'

'Do you mind telling me whether you think I ought to stay on here? Miss
Manisty is so kind—she wants me to stay till you leave, and then go to
Vallombrosa with you—next month. But—'

'Why "but"?'—said Mrs. Burgoyne, briskly, still in quest of rings, handkerchief, and fan,—'unless you are quite tired of us.'

The girl smiled. 'I couldn't be that. But—I think you'll be tired of me! And I've heard from the Porters of a quiet pension in Florence, where some friends of theirs will be staying till the middle of June. They would let me join them, till the Porters are ready for me.'

There was just a moment's pause before Eleanor said—

'Aunt Pattie would be very sorry. I know she counts on your going with her to Vallombrosa. I must go home by the beginning of June, and I believe Mr. Manisty goes to Paris.'

'And the book?' Lucy could not help saying, and then wished vehemently that she had left the question alone.

'I don't understand'—said Mrs. Burgoyne, stooping to look for her walking-shoes.

'I didn't—I didn't know whether it was still to be finished by the summer?'

'No one knows,—certainly not the author! But it doesn't concern me in the least.'

'How can it be finished without you?' said Lucy wondering. Again she could not restrain the spirit of eager championship which had arisen in her mind of late; though she was tremulously uncertain as to how far she might express it.

Certainly Mrs. Burgoyne showed a slight stiffening of manner.

'It will have to get finished without me, I'm afraid. Luckily I'm not wanted; but if I were, I shall have no time for anything but my father this summer.'

Lucy was silent. Mrs. Burgoyne finished tying her shoes, then rose, and said lightly—

'Besides—poor book! It wanted a change badly. So did I.—Now Mr. Neal will see it through.'

* * * * *

Lucy went to say good-bye to Aunt Pattie before starting. Eleanor, left alone, stood a moment, thoughtful, beside the dressing-table.

'She is sorry for me!' she said to herself, with a sudden, passionate movement.

This was the Nemi day—the day of festival, planned a fortnight before, to celebrate the end, the happy end of the book. It was to have been Eleanor's special day—the sign and seal of that good fortune she had brought her cousin and his work.

And now?—Why were they going? Eleanor hardly knew. She had tried to stop it. But Reggie Brooklyn had been asked, and the Ambassador's daughter. And Vanbrugh Neal had a fancy to see Nemi. Manisty, who had forgotten all that the day was once to signify, had resigned himself to the expedition—he who hated expeditions!—' because Neal wanted it.' There had not been a word said about it during the last few days that had not brought gall and wound to Eleanor. She, who thought she knew all that male selfishness was capable of, was yet surprised and pricked anew, hour after hour, by Manisty's casual sayings and assumptions.

It was like some gourd-growth in the night—the rise of this entangling barrier between herself and him. She knew that some of it came from those secret superstitions and fancies about himself and his work which she had often detected in him. If a companion or a place, even a particular table or pen had brought him luck, he would recur to them and repeat them with eagerness. But once prove to him the contrary, and she had seen him drop friend and pen with equal decision.

And as far as she could gather—as far as he would discuss the matter at all—it was precisely with regard to those portions of the book where her influence upon it had been strongest, that the difficulties put forward by Mr. Neal had arisen.

Her lip quivered. She had little or no personal conceit. Very likely Mr. Neal's criticisms were altogether just, and she had counselled wrongly. When she thought of the old days of happy consultation, of that vibrating sympathy of thought which had arisen between them, glorifying the winter days in Rome, of the thousand signs in him of a deep, personal gratitude and affection—

Vanished!—vanished! The soreness of heart she carried about with her, proudly concealed, had the gnawing constancy of physical pain. While he!—Nothing seemed to her more amazing than the lapses in mere gentlemanliness that Manisty could allow himself. He was capable on occasion of all that was most refined and tender in feeling. But once jar that central egotism of his, and he could behave incredibly! Through the small actions and omissions of every day, he could express, if he chose, a hardness of soul before which the woman shuddered.

Did he in truth mean her to understand, not only that she had been an intruder, and an unlucky one, upon his work and his intellectual life, but that any dearer hopes she might have based upon their comradeship were to be once for all abandoned? She stood there, lost in a sudden tumult of passionate pride and misery, which was crossed every now and then by a strange and bitter wonder.

Each of us carries about with him a certain mental image of himself—typical, characteristic—as we suppose; draped at any rate to our fancy; round which we group the incidents of life. Eleanor saw herself always as the proud woman; it is a guise in which we are none of us loth to masquerade. Haughtily dumb and patient during her married years; proud morally, socially, intellectually; finding in this stiffening of the self her only defence against the ugly realities of daily life. Proud too in her loneliness and grief—proud of her very grief, of her very capacity for suffering, of all the delicate shades of thought and sorrow which furnished the matter of her secret life, lived without a sign beside the old father whose coarser and commoner pride took such small account of hers!

And now—she seemed to herself to be already drinking humiliation, and foreseeing ever deeper draughts of it to come. She, who had never begged for anything, was in the mood to see her whole existence as a refused petition, a rejected gift. She had offered Edward Manisty her all of sympathy and intelligence, and he was throwing it back lightly, inexorably upon her hands. Her thin cheek burnt; but it was the truth. She annoyed and wearied him; and he had shaken her off; her, Eleanor Burgoyne! She did not know herself. Her inmost sense of identity was shaken.

She leant her head an instant against the frame of the open window, closing her tired eyes upon the great Campagna below her. A surge of rebellious will passed through her. Always submission, patience, silence,—till now! But there are moments when a woman must rouse herself, and fight—must not accept, but make, her fate.

Jealous! Was that last heat and ignominy of the soul to be hers too? She was to find it a threat and offence that he should spend some of the evenings that now went so heavily, talking with this girl,—this nice simple girl, whom she had herself bade him cultivate, whom she had herself brought into notice, rubbing off her angles,—drilling her into beauty? The very notion was madness and absurdity. It degraded her in her own eyes. It was the measure of her own self-ignorance. She—resign him at the first threat of another claim! The passionate life of her own heart amazed and stunned her.

The clock in the salon struck. She started, and went to straighten her veil at the glass. What would the afternoon bring her? Something it should bring her. The Nemi days of the winter were shrined in memory—each with its halo. Let her put out her full strength again, and now, before it was too late—before he had slipped too far away from her.

The poor heart beat hotly against the lace of her dress. What did she intend or hope for? She only knew that this might be one of her last chances with him—that the days were running out—and the moment of separation approached. Her whole nature was athirst, desperately athirst for she knew not what. Yet something told her that among these ups and downs of daily temper and fortune there lay strewn for her the last chances of her life.

* * * * *

'Please, ma'am, will you go in for a moment to Miss Manisty?'

The voice was Benson's, who had waylaid Mrs. Burgoyne in the salon.

Eleanor obeyed.

From the shadows of her dark room Aunt Pattie raised a wan face.

'Eleanor!—what do you think?'—

Eleanor ran to her. Miss Manisty handed her a telegram which read as follows—

'Your letter arrived too late to alter arrangements. Coming to-morrow—two or three nights—discuss plans.—ALICE.'

Eleanor let her hand drop, and the two ladies looked at each other in dismay.

'But you told her you couldn't receive her here?'

'Several times over. Edward will be in despair. How are we to have her here with Miss Foster? Her behaviour the last two months has been too extraordinary.'

Aunt Pattie fell back a languid little heap upon her pillows. Eleanor looked almost equally disconcerted.

'Have you told Edward?'

'No,' said Aunt Pattie miserably, raising a hand to her aching head, as though to excuse her lack of courage.

'Shall I tell him?'

'It's too bad to put such things on you.'

'No, not at all. But I won't tell him now. It would spoil the day. Some time before the evening.'

Aunt Pattie showed an aspect of relief.

'Do whatever you think best. It's very good of you—'

'Not at all. Dear Aunt Pattie!—lie still. By the way—has she anyone with her?'

'Only her maid—the one person who can manage her at all. That poor lady, you know, who tried to be companion, gave it up some time ago. Where shall we put her?'

'There are the two east rooms. Shall I tell Andreina to get them ready?'

Aunt Pattie acquiesced, with a sound rather like a groan.

'There is no chance still of stopping her?' said Eleanor, moving away.

'The telegram gives no address but Orte station,' said Aunt Pattie wearily; 'she must have sent it on her journey.'

'Then we must be prepared. Don't fret—dear Aunt Pattie!—we'll help you through.'

Eleanor stood a moment in the salon, thinking.

Unlucky! Manisty's eccentric and unmanageable sister had been for many years the secret burden of his life and Aunt Pattie's. Eleanor had been a witness of the annoyance and depression with which he had learnt during the winter that she was in Italy. She knew something of the efforts that had been made to keep her away from the villa.—

He would be furiously helpless and miserable under the infliction.—Somehow, her spirits rose.—

She went to the door of the salon, and heard the carriage drive up that was to take them to Nemi. Across Manisty's room, she saw himself on the balcony lounging and smoking till the ladies should appear. The blue lake with its green shores sparkled beyond him. The day was brightening. Certainly—let the bad news wait!

* * * * *

As they drove along the Galleria di Sotto, Manisty seemed to be preoccupied. The carriage had interrupted him in the midst of reading a long letter which he still held crumpled in his hand.

At last he said abruptly to Eleanor—'Benecke's last chance is up. He is summoned to submit next week at latest.'

'He tells you so?'

'Yes. He writes me a heart-broken letter.'

'Poor, poor fellow! It's all the Jesuits' doing. Mr. Neal told me the whole story.'

'Oh! it's tyranny of course. And the book's only a fraction of the truth,—a little Darwinian yeast leavening a lump of theology. But they're quite right. They can't help it.'

Eleanor looked at Lucy Foster and laughed.

'Dangerous to say those things before Miss Foster.'

'Does Miss Foster know anything about it?'—he said coolly.

Lucy hastily disclaimed any knowledge of Father Benecke and his affairs.

'They're very simple'—said Manisty. 'Father Benecke is a priest, but also a Professor. He published last year a rather Liberal book—very mildly liberal—some evolution—some Biblical criticism—just a touch! And a good deal of protest against the way in which the Jesuits are ruining Catholic University education in Germany. Lord! more than enough. They put his book on the Index within a month; he has had a year's grace to submit in; and now, if the submission is not made within a week or so, he will be first suspended, and then—excommunicated.'

'Who's "they"? 'said Lucy.

'Oh! the Congregation of the Index—or the people who set them on.'

'Is the book a bad book?'

'Quite the contrary.'

'And you're pleased?'

'I think the Papacy is keeping up discipline—and is not likely to go under just yet.'

He turned to her with his teasing laugh and was suddenly conscious of her new elegance. Where was the 'Sunday school teacher'? Transformed!—in five weeks—into this vision that was sitting opposite to him? Really, women were too wonderful! His male sense felt a kind of scorn for the plasticity of the sex.

'He has asked your opinion?' said Lucy, pursuing the subject.

'Yes. I told him the book was excellent—and his condemnation certain.'

Lucy bit her lip.

'Who did it?'

'The Jesuits—probably.'

'And you defend them?'

'Of course!—They're the only gentlemen in Europe who thoroughly understand their own business.'

'What a business!' said Lucy, breathing quick.—'To rush on every little bit of truth they see and stamp it out!'

'Like any other dangerous firework,—your simile is excellent.'

'Dangerous!' She threw back her head.—'To the blind and the cripples.'

'Who are the larger half of mankind. Precisely.'

She hesitated, then could not restrain herself.

'But you're not concerned?'

'I? Oh dear no. I can be trusted with fireworks. Besides I'm not a
Catholic.'

'Is that fair?—to stand outside slavery—and praise it?'

'Why not?—if it suits my purpose?'

The girl was silent. Manisty glanced at Eleanor; she caught the mischievous laugh in his eyes, and lightly returned it. It was his old comrade's look, come back. A warmer, more vital life stirred suddenly through all her veins; the slight and languid figure drew itself erect; her senses told her, hurriedly, for the first time that the May sun, the rapidly freshening air, and the quick movement of the carriage were all physically delightful.

How fast, indeed, the spring was conquering the hills! As they passed over the great viaduct at Aricia, the thick Chigi woods to the left masked the deep ravine in torrents of lightest foamiest green; and over the vast plain to the right, stretching to Ardea, Lanuvium and the sea, the power of the reawakening earth, like a shuttle in the loom, was weaving day by day its web of colour and growth, the ever brightening pattern of crop, and grass and vine. The beggars tormented them on the approach to Genzano, as they tormented of old Horace and Mæcenas; and presently the long falling street of the town, with its multitudes of short, wiry, brown-faced folk, its clatter of children and mules, its barbers and wine shops, brought them in sight again of the emerald-green Campagna, and the shiny hazes over the sea. In front rose the tower-topped hill of Monte Giove, marking the site of Corioli; and just as they turned towards Nemi the Appian Way ran across their path. Overhead, a marvellous sky with scudding veils of white cloud. The blur and blight of the scirocco had vanished without rain, under a change of wind. An all-blessing, all-penetrating sun poured upon the stirring earth. Everywhere fragments and ruins—ghosts of the great past—yet engulfed, as it were, and engarlanded by the active and fertile present.

And now they were to follow the high ridge above the deep-sunk lake, toward Nemi on its farther side—Nemi with its Orsini tower, grim and tall, rising on its fortress rock, high over the lake and what was once the thick grove or 'Nemus' of the Goddess, mantling the proud white of her inviolate temple.

'Look!'—said Eleanor, touching Lucy's hand. 'There's the niched wall—and the platform of the temple.'

And Lucy, bending eager brows, saw across the lake a line of great recesses, overgrown and shadowy against the steep slopes or cliffs of the crater, and in front of them a flat space, with one farm-shed upon it.

In the crater-wall, just behind and above the temple-site, was a black vertical cleft. Eleanor pointed it out to Manisty.

'Do you remember we never explored it? But the spring must be there?—Egeria's spring?'

Manisty lazily said he didn't know.

'Don't imagine you will be let off,' said Eleanor, laughing. 'We have settled every other point at Nemi. This is left for to-day. It will make a scramble after tea.'

'You will find it further than you think,' said Manisty, measuring the distance.

'So it was somewhere on that terrace he died—poor priest!'—said Lucy, musing.

Manisty, who was walking beside the carriage, turned towards her. Her little speech flattered him. But he laughed.

'I wonder how much it was worth—that place—in hard cash,' he said, drily.
'No doubt that was the secret of it.'

Lucy smiled—unwillingly. They were mounting a charming road high above the lake. Stretching between them and the lake were steep olive gardens and vineyards; above them light half-fledged woods climbed to the sky. In the vineyards the fresh red-brown earth shone amid the endless regiments of vines, just breaking into leaf; daisies glittered under the olives; and below, on a mid-way crag, a great wild-cherry, sun-touched, flung its boughs and blossoms, a dazzling pearly glory, over the dark blue hollow of the lake.

And on the farther side, the high, scooped-out wall of the crater rose rich and dark above the temple-site. How white—white—it must have shone!—thought Lucy. Her imagination had been caught by the priest's story. She saw Nemi for the first time as one who had seen it before. Timidly she looked at the man walking beside the carriage. Strange! She no longer disliked him as she had done, no longer felt it impossible that he should have written the earlier book which had been so dear to her. Was it that she had seen him chastened and depressed of late—had realised the comparative harmlessness of his vanity, the kindness and docility he could show to a friend? Ah no!—if he had been kind for one friend, he had been difficult and ungrateful for another. The thinness of Eleanor's cheek, the hollowness of her blue eye accused him. But even here the girl's inner mind had begun to doubt and demur. After all did she know much—or anything—of their real relation?

Certainly this afternoon he was a delightful companion. That phrase which Vanbrugh Neal had applied to him in Lucy's hearing, which had seemed to her so absurd, began after all to fit. He was bon enfant both to Eleanor and to her on this golden afternoon. He remembered Eleanor's love for broom and brought her bunches of it from the steep banks; he made affectionate mock of Neal's old-maidish ways; he threw himself with ejaculations, joyous, paradoxical, violent, on the unfolding beauty of the lake and the spring; and throughout he made them feel his presence as something warmly strong and human, for all his provoking defects, and that element of the uncommunicated and unexplained which was always to be felt in him. Eleanor began to look happier and younger than she had looked for days. And Lucy wondered why the long ascent to Nemi was so delightful; why the scirocco seemed to have gone from the air, leaving so purpureal and divine a light on mountain and lake and distance.

* * * * *

When they arrived at Nemi, Manisty as usual showed that he knew nothing of the practical arrangements of the day, which were always made for him by other people.

'What am I to do with these?' he said, throwing his hands in despair towards the tea-baskets in the carriage.—'We can't drive beyond this—And how are we to meet the others?—when do they come?—why aren't they here?'

He turned with peremptory impatience to Eleanor. She laid a calming hand upon his arm, pointing to the crowd of peasant folk from the little town that had already gathered round the carriage.

'Get two of those boys to carry the baskets. We are to meet the others at the temple. They come by the path from Genzano.'

Manisty's brow cleared at once like a child's. He went into the crowd, chattering his easy Italian, and laid hands on two boys, one of whom was straight and lithe and handsome as a young Bacchus, and bore the noble name of Aristodemo. Then, followed by a horde of begging children which had to be shaken off by degrees, they began the descent of the steep cliff on which Nemi stands. The path zigzagged downwards, and as they followed it, they came upon files of peasant women ascending, all bearing on their kerchiefed heads great flat baskets of those small wood-strawberries, or fragole, which are the chief crop of Nemi and its fields.

The handsome women, the splendid red of the fruit and the scent which it shed along the path, the rich May light upon the fertile earth and its spray of leaf and blossom, the sense of growth and ferment and pushing life everywhere—these things made Lucy's spirits dance within her. She hung back with the two boys, shyly practising her Italian upon them, while Eleanor and Manisty walked ahead.

But Manisty did not forget her. Half-way down the path, he turned back to look at her, and saw that she was carrying a light waterproof, which aunt Pattie had forced upon her lest the scirocco should end in rain. He stopped and demanded it. Lucy resisted.

'I can carry that,' he urged impatiently; 'it isn't baskets.'

'You could carry those,' she said laughing.

'Not in a world that grows boys and sixpences. But I want that cloak.
Please!'

The tone was imperious and she yielded. He hurried on to join Eleanor, carrying the cloak with his usual awkwardness, and often trailing it in the dust. Lucy, who was very neat and precise in all her personal ways, suffered at the sight, and wished she had stood firm. But to be waited on and remembered by him was not a disagreeable experience; perhaps because it was still such a new and surprising one.

Presently they were on the level of the lake, and their boys guided them through a narrow and stony by-path, to the site of the temple, or as the peasant calls it the 'Giardino del Lago.'

It is a flat oblong space, with a two-storied farm building—part of it showing brickwork of the early Empire—standing upon it. To north and east runs the niched wall in which, deep under accumulations of soil, Lord Savile found the great Tiberius, and those lost portrait busts which had been waiting there through the centuries till the pick and spade of an Englishman should release them. As to the temple walls which the English lord uncovered, the trenches that he dug, and the sacrificial altar that he laid bare—the land, their best guardian, has taken them back into itself. The strawberries grow all over them; only strange billows and depressions in the soil make the visitor pause and wonder. The earth seems to say to him—'Here indeed are secrets and treasures—but not for you! I have been robbed enough. The dead are mine. Leave them in my breast. And you!—go your ways in the sun!'

They made their way across the strawberry fields, looking for the friends who were to join them—Reggie Brooklyn, Mr. Neal, and the two ladies. There was no sign of them whatever. Yet, according to time and trains, they should have been on the spot, waiting.

'Annoying!' said Manisty, with his ready irritability. 'Reggie might really have managed better.—Who's this fellow?'

It was the padrone or tenant of the Giardino, who came up and parleyed with them. Yes, 'Vostra Eccellenza' might put down their baskets and make their tea. He pointed to a bench behind the shed. The forestieri came every day; he turned away in indifference.

Meanwhile the girls and women gathering among the strawberries, raised themselves to look at the party, flashing their white teeth at Aristodemo, who was evidently a wit among them. They flung him gibes as he passed, to which he replied disdainfully. A group of girls who had been singing together, turned round upon him, 'chaffing' him with shrill voices and outstretched necks, like a flock of young cackling geese, while he, holding himself erect, threw them back flinty words and glances, hitting at every stroke, striding past them with the port of a young king. Then they broke into a song which they could hardly sing for laughing—about a lover who had been jilted by his mistress. Aristodemo turned a deaf ear, but the mocking song, sung by the harsh Italian voices, seemed to fill the hollow of the lake and echoed from the steep side of the crater. The afternoon sun, striking from the ridge of Genzano, filled the rich tangled cup, and threw its shafts into the hollows of the temple wall. Lucy standing still under the heat and looking round her, felt herself steeped and bathed in Italy. Her New England reserve betrayed almost nothing; but underneath, there was a young passionate heart, thrilling to nature and the spring, conscious too of a sort of fate in these delicious hours, that were so much sharper and full of meaning than any her small experience had yet known.

She walked on to look at the niched wall, while Manisty and Eleanor parleyed with Aristodemo as to the guardianship of the tea. Presently she heard their steps behind her, and she turned back to them eagerly.

'The boy was in that tree!'—she said to Manisty, pointing to a great olive that flung its branches over a mass of ruin, which must once have formed part of an outer enclosure wall beyond the statued recesses.

'Was he?' said Manisty, surprised into a smile. 'You know best.—You are very kind to that nonsense.'

She hesitated.

'Perhaps—perhaps you don't know why I liked it so particularly. It reminded me of things in your other book.'

'The "Letters from Palestine"?' said Manisty, half amused, half astonished.

'I suppose you wonder I should have seen it? But we read a great deal in my country! All sorts of people read—men and women who do the roughest work with their hands, and never spend a cent on themselves they can help. Uncle Ben gave it me. There was a review of it in the "Springfield Republican"—I guess they will have sent it you. But'—her voice took a shy note—'do you remember that piece about the wedding feast at Cana—where you imagined the people going home afterwards over the hill paths—how they talked, and what they felt?'

'I remember something of the sort,' said Manisty—I wrote it at
Nazareth—in the spring. I'm sure it was bad!'

'I don't know why you say that?' She knit her brows a little. 'If I shut my eyes, I seemed to be walking with them. And so with your goat-herd. I'm certain it was that tree!' she said, pointing to the tree, her bright smile breaking. 'And the grove was here.—And the people came running down from the village on the cliff,'—she turned her hand towards Nemi.

Manisty was flattered again, all the more because the girl had evidently no intention of flattery whatever, but was simply following the pleasure of her own thought. He strolled on beside her, poking into the niches, and talking, as the whim took him, pouring out upon her indeed some of the many thoughts and fancies which had been generated in him by those winter visits to Nemi that he and Eleanor had made together.

Eleanor loitered behind, looking at the strawberry gatherers.

'The next train should bring them here in about an hour,' she thought to herself in great flatness of spirit. 'How stupid of Reggie!'

Then as she lifted her eyes, they fell upon Manisty and Lucy, strolling along the wall together, he talking, she turning her brilliant young face towards him, her white dress shining in the sun.

A thought—a perception—thrust itself like a lance-point through Eleanor's mind.—She gave an inward cry—a cry of misery. The lake seemed to swim before her.

CHAPTER VIII

They made their tea under the shadow of the farm-building, which consisted of a loft above, and a large dark room on the ground floor, which was filled with the flat strawberry-baskets, full and ready for market.

Lucy found the little festa delightful, though all that the ladies had to do was to make an audience for Aristodemo and Manisty. The handsome dare-devil lad began to talk, drawn out by the Englishman, and lo! instead of a mere peasant they had got hold of an artist and a connoisseur! Did he know anything of the excavations and the ruins? Why, he knew everything! He chattered to them, with astonishing knowledge and shrewdness, for half an hour. Complete composure, complete good-humour, complete good manners—he possessed them all. Easy to see that he was the son of an old race, moulded by long centuries of urbane and civilised living!

A little boastful, perhaps. He too had found the head of a statue, digging in his father's orchard. Man or woman?—asked Mrs. Burgoyne. A woman. And handsome? The handsomest lady ever seen. And perfect? Quite perfect. Had she a nose, for instance? He shook his young head in scorn. Naturally she had a nose! Did the ladies suppose he would have picked up a creature without one?

Then he rose and beckoned smiling to Eleanor and Lucy. They followed him through the cool lower room, where the strawberries gleamed red through the dark, up the creaking stairs to the loft. And there on the ground was an old box and in the box, a few score of heads and other fragments—little terracottas, such as the peasants turn up every winter as they plough or dig among the olives.. Delicate little hooded women, heads of Artemis with the crown of Cybele, winged heads, or heads covered with the Phrygian cap, portrait-heads of girls or children, with their sharp profiles still perfect, and the last dab of the clay under the thumb of the artist, as clear and clean as when it was laid there some twenty-two centuries ago.

Lucy bent over them in a passion of pleasure, turning over the little things quite silently, but with sparkling looks.

'Would you like them?' said Manisty, who had followed them, and stood over her, cigarette in hand.

'Oh no!' said Lucy, rising in confusion. 'Don't get them for me.'

'Come away,' said Eleanor, laughing. 'Never interfere between a man and a bargain.'

The padrone indeed appeared at the moment. Manisty sent the ladies downstairs, and the bargaining began.

When he came downstairs ten minutes later a small basket was in his hand. He offered it to Lucy, while he held out his other hand to Eleanor. The hand contained two fragments only, but of exquisite quality, one a fine Artemis head with the Cybele crown, the other merely the mask or shell of a face, from brow to chin,—a gem of the purest and loveliest Greek work.

Eleanor took them with a critical delight. Her comments were the comments of taste and knowledge. They were lightly given, without the smallest pedantry, but Manisty hardly answered them. He walked eagerly to Lucy Foster, whose shy intense gratitude, covering an inward fear that he had spent far, far too much money upon her, and that she had indecorously provoked his bounty, was evidently attractive to him. He told her that he had got them for a mere nothing, and they sat down on the bench behind the house together, turning them over, he holding forth, and now and then discovering through her modest or eager replies, that she had been somehow remarkably well educated by that old Calvinist uncle of hers. The tincture of Greek and Latin, which had looked so repellent from a distance, presented itself differently now that it enabled him to give his talk rein, and was partly the source in her of these responsive grateful looks which became her so well. After all perhaps her Puritan stiffness was only on the surface. How much it had yielded already to Eleanor's lessons! He really felt inclined to continue them on his own account; to test for himself this far famed pliancy of the American woman.

Meanwhile Eleanor moved away, watching the path from Genzano which wound downwards from the Sforza Cesarini villa to the 'Giardino,' and was now visible, now hidden by the folds of the shore.

Presently Manisty and Lucy heard her exclamation.

'At last!—What has Reggie been about?'