BOOK I

I

The baby opened its eyes and said: "I am hungry."

Nothing moved in the silent, shadowy room, and the baby repeated its brief inarticulate cry. There were hurrying footsteps; light arms raised it, and a laughing voice soothed it with senseless, sweet-sounding words. Then its cheek was laid on a cool young breast, and all was tepid tenderness and mild delight. Soon, on the wave of a light-swinging breath, it drooped into sleep again.

* * * * *

Edith Avory had hurried home across the meadow from the children's party at the vicarage, her pendant plaits flying, her straw hat aslant, and now she entered the dining-room of the Grey House fluttered and breathless.

"Have they come?" she asked of Florence, who was laying the cloth for tea.

"Yes, dear," answered the maid.

"Where are they? Where is the baby?" and, without waiting for an answer, the child ran out of the room and helter-skeltered upstairs.

In front of the nursery she stopped. It was her own room, but through the closed door she had heard a weak, shrill cry that plucked at her heart. Slowly she opened the door, then paused on the threshold, startled and disappointed.

Near the window, gazing out across the verdant Hertfordshire fields, sat a large, square-faced woman in pink print, and on her lap, face downward, wrapped in flannel, lay a baby. The nurse was slapping it on the back with quick, regular pats. Edith saw the soles of two little red feet, and at the other end a small, oblong head, covered with soft black hair.

"Oh dear!" said Edith. "Is _that_ the baby?"

"Please shut the door, miss," said the nurse.

"I thought babies had yellow hair, with long muslin dresses and blue bows," faltered Edith.

The square-faced nurse did not answer, but continued pat--pat--pat with her large hand on the small round back.

Edith stepped a little nearer. "Why do you do that?" she asked.

The woman looked the little girl up and down before she answered. Then she said, "Wind," and went on patting.

Edith wondered what that meant. Did it refer to the weather? or was it, perhaps, a slangy servant's way of saying, "Leave me alone" or "Hold your tongue"?

"Has the baby's mother come too?" she asked.

"Yes," said the nurse; "and when you go out, will you please shut the door behind you?"

Edith did so.

She heard voices in her mother's room, and looked in. Sitting near her mother on the sofa was a girl dressed in black, with black hair, like the baby's. She was crying bitterly into a small black-edged handkerchief.

"Oh, Edith dear," said her mother, "that's right! Come here. This is your sister Valeria. Kiss her, and tell her not to cry."

"But where is the baby's mother?" said Edith, glad to gain time before kissing the wet, unknown face.

The girl in mourning lifted her eyes, dark and swimming, from the handkerchief. "It is me," she said, with a swift, shining smile, and one of her tears rolled into a dimple and stopped there. "What a dear little girl for my baby to play with!" she added, and kissed Edith on both cheeks.

"That size baby cannot play," said Edith, drying her face with the back of her hand. "And the woman was hitting it!"

"Hitting it!" cried the girl in black, jumping up.

"Hitting it!" cried Edith's mother.

And they both hurried out.

Edith, left alone, looked round the familiar room. On her mother's bed lay a little flannel blanket like the one the baby was wearing, and a baby's cap, and some knitted socks, and a rubber rattle. On a chair was a black jacket and a hat trimmed with crape and dull black cherries. Edith squeezed one of the cherries, which broke stickily. Then she went to the looking-glass and tried the hat on. Her long small face looked back at her gravely under the caliginous head-dress, as she shook her head from side to side, to make it totter and tilt. "When I am a widow I shall wear a thing like this," she said to herself, and then dropped it from her head upon the chair. She quickly squeezed another cherry, and went out to look at the baby.

It was in the nursery in its grandmother's arms, being danced up and down; its fist was in its mouth, and its large eyes stared at nothing. Its mother, the girl in black, was on her knees before it, clapping her hands and saying: "Cara! Cara! Cara! Bella! Bella! Bella!" Wilson, the nurse, with her back to them, was emptying Edith's chest of drawers, and putting all Edith's things neatly folded upon the table, ready to be taken to a little room upstairs that was henceforth to be hers. For the baby needed Edith's room.

The little girl soon tired of looking, and went down to the garden. Passing the verandah, she could hear the gardener laughing and talking with Florence. He was saying:

"Now, of course, Miss Edith's nose is quite put out of joint."

Florence said: "I'm afraid so, poor lamb!"

Edith ran to the shrubbery, and put her hand to her nose. It did not hurt her; it felt much the same as usual. Still, she was anxious and vaguely disturbed. "I must tell the Brown boy," she said, and went to the kitchen-garden to look for him.

There he was, on his knees, patting mould round the strawberry-plants; a good deal of earth was on his face and in his rusty hair.

"Good-evening," said Edith, stopping near him, with her hands behind her.

"Hullo!" said the gardener's boy, looking up.

"They've come," said Edith.

"Have they?" and Jim Brown sat back on his heels and cleaned his fingers on his trousers.

"The baby is black," said Edith.

"Sakes alive!" said Jim, opening large light eyes that seemed to have dropped into his face by mistake.

"It has got black hair," continued Edith, "and a red face."

"Oh, Miss Edith, you are a goose!" said the Brown boy. "That's all right. I thought you meant it was all black, because of its mother being a foreigner."

Edith shook her head. "It's not all right. Babies should have golden hair."

"What is the mother like?" asked Jim.

"She's black, too; and the nurse is horrid. And what is the matter with my nose?"

"Eh?" said Jim Brown.

"Yes. Look at my nose. What's wrong with it?"

The Brown boy looked at it. Then he looked closer. Little by little an expression of horror came over his face. "Oh!" he exclaimed. "Oh my! Just think of it!"

"What? What is it?" cried Edith. "It was all right just now." And as the boy kept staring at her nose with growing amazement, she screamed: "Tell me what it is! Tell me, or I'll hit you!"

Then the Brown boy got up and danced round her in a frenzy of horror at what was the matter with her nose; so she took a small stone and threw it at him. Whereupon he went back to his strawberry-plants, and declined to speak to her any more.

When he saw her walking forlornly away with her hand to her nose, and her two plaits dangling despondently behind, he felt sorry, and called her back.

"I was only larking, Miss Edith. Your nose is all right." So she was comforted, and sat down on the grass to talk to him.

"Valeria speaks Italian to the baby, and they have come to stay always," she said. "The baby is going to have my room, and I am going to be upstairs near Florence. We are all going to dress in black, because of my brother Tom having died. And mamma has been crying about it for the last four days. And that baby is my niece."

"Your brother, Master Tom, was the favourite with them all, wasn't he?" said Jim.

"Oh, yes," said Edith. "There were so many of us that, of course, the middle ones were liked best."

"I don't quite see that," said Jim.

"Oh, well," explained Edith, "I suppose they were tired of the old ones, and did not want the new ones, so that's why. Anyhow," she added, "it doesn't matter. They're all dead now."

Then she helped him with the strawberry-plants until it was time for tea.

Her grandfather came to call her in--a tall, stately figure, shuffling slowly down the gravel path. Edith ran to meet him, and put her warm fingers into his cool, shrivelled hand. Together they walked towards the house.

"Have you seen them, grandpapa?" she asked, curvetting round him, as he proceeded at gentle pace across the lawn.

"Seen whom, my dear?" asked the old gentleman.

"Valeria and the baby."

"What baby?" said the grandfather, stopping to rest and listen.

"Why, Tom's baby, grandpapa," said Edith. "You know--the baby of Tom who is dead. It has come to stay here with its mother and nurse. Her name is Wilson."

"Dear me!" said the grandfather, and walked on a few steps.

Then he paused again. "So Tom is dead."

"Oh, you knew that long ago. I told you so."

"So you did," said the old gentleman. He took off his skullcap, and passed his hand over his soft white hair. "Which Tom is that--my son Tom or his son Tom?"

"Both Toms," said Edith. "They're both dead. One died four days ago, and the other died six years ago, and you oughtn't to mix them up like that. One was my papa and your son, and the other was his son and the baby's papa. Now don't forget that again."

"No, my dear," said the grandfather. Then, after a while: "And you say his name is Wilson?"

"Whose name?" exclaimed Edith.

"Why, my dear, how should I know?" said the grandfather.

Then Edith laughed, and the old gentleman laughed with her.

"Never mind," said Edith. "Come in and see the baby--your son Tom's son's baby."

"Your son's Tom's sons," murmured the grandfather, stopping again to think. "Tom's sons your son's Tom's sons ... Where do I put in the baby?"

Edith awoke in the middle of the night, listening and alert. "What is that?" she said, sitting up in bed.

Florence's voice came from the adjoining room: "Go to sleep, my lamb. It's only the baby."

"Why does it scream like that?"

"It must have got turned round like," explained Florence sleepily.

"Then why don't they turn it straight again?" asked Edith.

"Oh, Miss Edith," replied Florence impatiently, "do go to sleep. When a baby gets 'turned round,' it means that it sleeps all day and screams all night."

And so it did.

II

A gentle blue February was slipping out when March tore in with screaming winds and rushing rains. He pushed the diffident greenness back, and went whistling rudely across the lands. The chilly drenched season stood still. One morning Spring peeped round the corner and dropped a crocus or two and a primrose or two. She whisked off again, with the wind after her, but looked in later between two showers. And suddenly, one day, there she was, enthroned and garlanded. Frost-spangles melted at her feet, and the larks rose.

Valeria borrowed Edith's garden-hat, tied it under her chin with a black ribbon, and went out into the young sunshine across the fields. Around her was the gloss of recent green, pushing upwards to the immature blue of the sky. And Tom, her husband, was dead.

Tom lay in the dark, away from it all, under it all, in the distant little cemetery of Nervi, where the sea that he loved shone and danced within a stone's-throw of his folded hands.

Tom's folded hands! That was all she could see of him when she closed her eyes and tried to recall him. She could not remember his face. Try as she would, shutting her eyes with concentrated will, the well-known features wavered and slipped away; and nothing remained before her but those dull white hands as she had seen them last--terrible, unapproachable hands!

Were those the hands Tom was so particular about and rather vain of--the hands she had patted and laid her cheek against? Were those hands--fixed, cessated, all-relinquishing--the hands that had painted the Italian landscapes she loved, and the other pictures she hated, because in them all stood Carlotta of Trastevere, rippling-haired, bare, and deliberate? Were those the hands that had rowed her and Uncle Giacomo in the little boat _Luisa_ on the Lake Maggiore?--the hands that had grasped hers suddenly at the Madonna del Monte the day she had put on her light blue dress, with the sailor collar and scarlet tie? She seemed to hear him say, with his droll English accent: "Volete essere sposina mia?" And she had laughed and answered him in the only two English words she knew, and which he himself had taught her across the table d'hôte: "Please! Thank you!" Then they had both laughed, until Zio Giacomo had said that the Madonna would punish them.

The Madonna had punished them. She had struck him down in his twenty-sixth year, a few months after they were married, shattering his youth like a bubble of glass. Valeria had heard him, day after day, night after night, coughing his life away in little hard coughs and clearings of his throat; then in racking paroxysms that left him breathless and spent; then in a loose, easy cough that he scarcely noticed. They had gone from Florence, where it was too windy, to Nervi, where it was too hot; from Nice, where it was too noisy, to Airolo, where it was too dull; then, with a rush of hope, with hurried packing of coats and shawls, of paintbrushes and colours, of skates and snowshoes, they had journeyed up to Davos. And there the sun shone, and the baby was born; and Tom Avory went skating and bob-sleighing, and gained six pounds in eight weeks.

Then one day an American woman, whose son was dying, said to Valeria: "It is bad for your baby to stay up here. Send her away, or when she is fifteen she will start coughing too."

"Send her away!" Yes, the baby must be sent away. The deadly swarm of germs from all the stricken lungs seemed to Valeria to envelope her and her child like a cloud--the cloud of death. She could feel it, see it, taste it. The smell of it was on her pillow at night; the sheets and blankets exhaled it; her food was impregnated with it. She herself was full-grown, and strong and sound; but her baby--her fragile, rose-bud baby--was Tom's child, too! All Tom's brothers and sisters, except one little girl called Edith, who was in England, had died in their adolescence--one in Bournemouth; one in Torquay; one in Cannes; one, Tom's favourite sister, Sally, in Nervi--all fleeing from the death they carried within them. Now Davos had saved Tom. But the baby must be sent away.

They consulted three doctors. One said there was no hurry; another said there was no danger; the third said there was no knowing.

Valeria and Tom determined that they would not take risks. One snowy day they travelled down to Landquart. There Tom was to leave them and return to Davos. But the baby was crying, and Valeria was crying; so Tom jumped into the train after them, and said he would see them as far as Zürich, where Uncle Giacomo would be waiting to take them to Italy.

"Then you will be all right, helpless ones," he said, putting his arm round them both, as the little train carried them down towards the mists. And he gave his baby-girl a finger to clutch.

But Tom never reached Zürich. What reached Zürich was stern and awful, with limp, falling limbs and blood-stained mouth. The baby cried, and Valeria cried, and crowds and officials gathered round them. But Tom could help his helpless ones no more.

His will was found in his breast-pocket. "Sposina mia, with all my worldly goods I thee endow. Take our baby to England. Bury me in Nervi, near Sally. I have been very happy.--TOM."

These things Valeria Avory remembered as she walked in the soft English sunshine, crying under Edith's garden-hat. When she reached a little bridge across an angry stream, she leaned over the parapet to look at the water, and the borrowed hat fell off and floated away.

Valeria ran down the bank after it, but it was in midstream, resting lightly against a protruding stone. She threw sticks and pebbles at it, and it moved off and sailed on, with one black ribbon, like a thin arm, stretched behind it. Valeria ran along the sloping bank, sliding on slippery grass and wet stones; and the hat quivered and curtseyed away buoyantly on the miniature waves. When the stream elbowed off towards the wood, the hat bobbed along with it, and so did Valeria. As she and the stream and the hat turned the corner, she heard an exclamation of surprise, and, raising her flushed face, she saw a young man, in grey tweeds, fishing on the other side of the water.

The young man said: "Hang it all! Good-bye, trout!" And Valeria said: "Can you catch my hat?"

He caught it with great difficulty, holding it with the thick end of his rod, and flattering it towards him with patient man[oe]uvres.

"My trout!" he murmured. "I had been after that fat fellow for three days." Then he dragged the large splashing hat out of the water and held it up. "Here's your hat." It had never been a beautiful hat; it was a dreary-looking thing that Edith had had much wear out of. It had not the appearance of a hat worth fishing three days for.

"Oh, thank you so much! How shall I reach it?" said Valeria, extending a small muddy hand from her side of the stream.

"I suppose I must bring it across," said the young man, still holding the dripping adornment at arm's length.

"Oh no!" said Valeria. "Throw it."

The young man laughed, and said: "Don't try to catch! It will give you a cold." He flung the hat across, and it fell flat and sodden at Valeria's feet.

"Oh dear!" she said, picking it up, with puckered brows, while the black tulle ruffles fell from it, soft and soaking. "What shall I do with it now? I can't put it on. And I don't think I can carry it, walking along these slippery banks."

"Well, throw it back again," said the young man, "and I'll carry it for you."

So she threw the heavy melancholy thing at him, and they walked along, with the water between them, smiling at each other. On the bridge they met, and shook hands.

"I am sorry about your fishes," she said.

"My fishes?" He laughed. "Oh, never mind them. I am sorry about your hat." Then, noting the damp ringlets on her forehead and the dimple in her cheek, he added: "What will you put on when you come to-morrow?"

"To-morrow?" she asked, raising simple eyes.

"Yes; will you?" he said, blushing a little, for he was very young. "At this time"--he looked at his watch--"about eleven o'clock?"

Valeria blushed, too--a sudden crimson flush that left her face white and waxen. "Is it eleven o'clock?" she exclaimed. "Are you sure?"

"Yes; what is the matter?"

"The baby!" gasped Valeria. "I had forgotten the baby!" And she turned and ran down the bridge and across the fields, her black gown flying, the wet hat flapping at her side.

She reached home breathless. The nurse was on the verandah, waiting. "Am I late, Wilson?" she panted.

"Yes, madam," said the nurse, with tight and acid lips.

"How is baby?" gasped Valeria.

"The baby," said the woman, gazing at her, sphinx-like and severe, "is hungry."

III

The young man went to fish in the little stream every day, but he only caught his fat trout. The dimpled girl in mourning did not come again. His holiday was ended, and he returned to his rooms in London, but he left a love-letter for Valeria on the bank, pinned to the crumpled black ruffle that had fallen off her hat, and with a stone on it to keep it down.

Valeria found the love-letter. She had stayed indoors a week, repenting. Then Spring and her youth joined hands, and drew her out of doors and across the fields again. She went, blushing and faltering, with a bunch of violets pinned at her belt. No one saw her but a tail-flicking, windy-haired pony in a meadow, who frisked suddenly after her and made her shiver.

Close to the stream her eye caught the tattered black ruffle and the note pinned to it. The young man wrote that his name was Frederick Allen; that he was reading for the Bar and writing for newspapers. He said that she had haunting eyes, and that they would probably never meet again. He wondered whether she had found the baby, and where she had forgotten it, and what baby it was. And she _might_ have turned round just once to wave him farewell! He hoped she would not be displeased if he said that he loved her, and would never forget her. Would she tell him her name? Only her name! Please, please! He was hers in utter devotion, FREDERICK.

Valeria went back in a dream and looked up the word "haunting" in her English-Italian Dictionary. She did not remember his eyes: they were blue, she thought, or perhaps brown. But his face was clear and sunburnt, and his smooth-parted hair was bright when he took off his hat on the bridge.

She thought she would simply return his letter. Then she decided that she would add a few words of rebuke. Finally one rainy day, when everybody had seemed cross, and Edith had answered rudely, and the baby had screamed for Wilson who was not there, Valeria, with qualms and twinges, took a sheet of paper and wrote her name on it. The paper had a black border. Valeria suddenly fell on her knees and kissed the black border, and prayed that Tom might forgive her. Then she burned it, and went to her baby, who was quarrelling with everything and trying to kill an India-rubber sheep.

Yet one day in April--an April swooning with soft suggestions, urging its own evanescence and the fleeting sweetness of life--Mr. Frederick Allen, in his London lodgings, received two letters instead of one. Hannah, the pert maid who brought them to his room, lingered while he opened them. In the first was a cheque for six guineas from a periodical; in the other was a visiting-card:

VALERIA NINA AVORY.

"Who the dickens...?" he said, turning the card over. "Here!" and he threw it across to Hannah. "Here's a French modiste, or something, if you want falals!"

Then, as he had received six guineas when he had only expected four, he shut up his law-book, pinched Hannah's cheek _en passant_, and went out for a day up the river with the man next door.

The card was thrown into the coal-box, and the kitchen-maid burnt it. And that is all.

* * * * *

April brought the baby a tooth.

May brought it another tooth, and gave a wave to its hair. June took away its bibs, and gave it a smile with a dimple copied from Valeria's. July brought it short lace frocks and a word or two. August stood it upright and exultant, with its back to the wall; and September sent it tottering and trilling into its mother's arms.

Its name was Giovanna Desiderata Felicita.

"I cannot remember that," said the grandfather. "Call him Tom."

"But, grandpapa, it is a girl," said Edith.

"I know, my dear. You have told me so before," said the old gentleman testily. He had become very irritable since there had been so much noise in the house.

"Well, what girl's name can you remember?" asked Mrs. Avory, patting her old father's hand, and frowning at her daughter, Edith.

"None--none at all," said the old man.

"Come now, come now, dear!" said Mrs. Avory. "Can you remember Annie, or Mary?"

"No, I cannot," said her father.

Then Edith suggested "Jane," and Valeria "Camilla." And Florence, who was laying the cloth, said: "Try him with 'Nellie' or 'Katy.'" But the old gentleman peevishly refused to remember any of those names.

And for months he called the baby Tom.

* * * * *

One day at dinner he said: "Where is Nancy?"

Mrs. Avory and Edith glanced at each other, and Valeria looked up in surprise.

"Where is Nancy?" repeated the grandfather impatiently.

Mrs. Avory coughed. Then she laid her hand gently on his sleeve. "Nancy is in heaven," she said softly.

_"What!"_ cried the old gentleman, throwing down his table-napkin and glaring round the table.

"Your dear little daughter Nancy died many, many years ago," said Mrs. Avory.

The old gentleman rose. "It is not true!" he said with shaking voice. "She was here this morning. I saw her." Then his lips trembled, and he began to cry.

Valeria suddenly started up and ran from the room. In a moment she was back again, with her baby in its pink nightdress, kicking and crowing in her arms.

"Here's Nancy!" she said, with a little break in her voice.

"Why, of course!" cried Edith, clapping her hands. "Don't cry, grandpapa. Here's Nancy."

"Yes," said Mrs. Avory. "See, father dear, here's Nancy!"

The old man looked up, and his dim blue eyes met and held the sparkling eyes of the child. Long and deeply he looked into the limpid depths that returned his unwavering gaze.

"Yes, here's Nancy," said the old man.

So the baby was Nancy ever after.

IV

When Nancy had three candles round her birthday-cake, and was pulling crackers with her eyes shut, and her mother's hands pressed tightly over her ears, Edith put her elbows on the table, and said:

"What is Nancy going to be?"

"Good," answered Nancy quickly--"veddy good. Another cwacker."

So she got another cracker, and Edith repeated her question.

Mrs. Avory said: "What do you mean?"

"Well," said Edith, whose two plaits had melted into one, with a large black bow fastened irrelevantly to the wrong end of it, "you don't want her to be just a girl, do you?"

Valeria blushed, and said: "I have often thought I should like her to be a genius."

Edith nodded approval, and Mrs. Avory looked dubiously at the little figure, now discreetly dragging the tablecloth down in an attempt to reach the crackers. Nancy noted the soft look, and sidled round to her grandmother.

"Hold my ears," she said, "and give me a cwacker."

Mrs. Avory patted the small head, and smoothed out the blue ribbon that tied up the tuft of black curls.

"Why do you want me to hold your ears?"

"Because I am afwaid of the cwackers."

"Then why do you want the crackers?"

"Because I like them."

"But why do you like them?"

"Because I am afwaid of them!" and Nancy smiled bewitchingly.

Everybody found this an astonishingly profound reply, and the question of Nancy's genius recurred constantly in the conversation.

Edith said: "Of course, it will be painting. Her father, poor dear Tom, was such a wonderful landscape-painter. And I believe he did some splendid figures, too."

Mrs. Avory concurred; but Valeria shook her head and changed colour. "Oh, I hope not!" she said, instant tears gathering in her eyes.

Mrs. Avory looked hurt. "Why not, Valeria?" she said.

"Oh, the smell," sobbed Valeria; "and the models ... and I could not bear it. Oh, my Tom--my dear Tom!" And she sobbed convulsively, with her head on Mrs. Avory's shoulder, and with Edith's arm round her.

Nancy screamed loud, and had to be taken away to the nursery, where Fräulein Müller, the German successor of Wilson, shook her.

"Could it not be music?" said Valeria, after a while, drying her eyes dejectedly. "My mother was a great musician; she played the harp, and composed lovely songs. When she died, and I went to live in Milan with Uncle Giacomo, I used to play all Chopin's mazurkas and impromptus to him, although he said he hated music if anyone else played.... And, then, when I married ..."--Valeria's sobs burst forth again--"dear Tom ... said ..."

Edith intervened quickly. "I certainly think it ought to be music;" and she kissed Valeria's hot face. "The kiddy sings 'Onward, Christian Soldiers,' and 'Schlaf, Kindchen' in perfect tune. Fräulein was telling me so, and said how remarkable it was."

So Nancy was sent for again, and was brought in by Fräulein, who had a scratch on her cheek.

Nancy was told to sing, "Schlaf, Kindchen, schlaf, da draussen steht ein Schaf," and she did so with very bad grace and not much voice. But loud and servile applause from everyone, including Fräulein, gratified her, and she volunteered her entire repertoire, comprising "There'll be razors a-flyin' in the air," which she had learned incidentally from the attractive and supercilious gardener's boy, Jim Brown.

So it was decided that Nancy should be a great musician, and a piano with a small keyboard was obtained for her at once. A number of books on theory and harmony were bought, and Edith said Valeria was to read them carefully, and to teach Nancy without letting her notice it. But Nancy noticed it. And at last she used to cry and stamp her feet as soon as she saw her mother come into the room.

Fräulein, with much diplomacy, and according to a German book on education, taught her her notes and her alphabet at the same time; but the result was confusion. Nancy insisted on spelling words at the piano, and could find no "o" for dog, and no "t" for cat, and no anything; while the Italian Valeria added obscurity and bewilderment by calling "d" _re_, and "g" _sol_, and "b" _c_. Nancy became sour and suspicious. In everything that was said to her she scented a trap for the conveying of musical knowledge, and she trusted no one, and would speak to no one but Jim Brown and the grandfather.

At last she lit upon a device that afflicted and horrified her tormentors. One day, when her mother was drawing little men, that turned out to be semibreves, Nancy, speechless with anger, put her hand to her soft hair, and dragged out a handful of it. Valeria gave a cry; she opened the little fist, and saw the soft black fluff lying there.

"Oh, baby, baby! how could you!" she cried. "What a dreadful thing! How can you grieve your poor mother so!"

That ended the musical education. Every time that a note lifted its black head over Nancy's horizon, up went her hand, and she pulled out a tuft of her hair. Then she opened her fist and showed it. Books on harmony were put away; the piano was locked. No more Beethoven or Schumann was sung to her in the guise of lullabies by Fräulein at night; but her old friend, "Baby Bunting," returned, and accompanied her, as of old, when she sailed down the stream of sleep, afloat on the darkness.

"Bye, Baby Bunting, Father's gone a-hunting, To shoot a rabbit for its skin, To wrap little Baby Bunting in."

* * * * *

... Nancy sat on the grass, nursing her doll, and watching three small rampant feathers on Fräulein Müller's hat, nodding, like little plumes on a hearse, in time with something she was reading.

"What are you reading?" asked Nancy.

Fräulein Müller went on nodding, and read aloud: "'Shine out, little het, sunning over with gurls.'"

_"What?"_ said Nancy.

"'Shine out, little het, sunning over with gurls,'" repeated Fräulein Müller.

"What does mean 'sunning over with girls'?" cried Nancy, frowning.

"Gurls, gurls--hair-gurls!" explained Fräulein.

"_Curls!_ Are you sure it is curls?" said Nancy, dropping her doll in the grass, and folding her hands. "Read it again. Slowly."

"'Shine out, little het,'" repeated Fräulein. And Nancy said it after her. "'Shine out, little head, shine out, little head ... sunning over with curls.'"

Then she said to her governess: "Say that over and over and over again, until I tell you not to;" and she shut her eyes.

"Aber warum?" asked Fräulein Müller.

Nancy did not open her eyes nor answer.

"Komische Kleine," said Fräulein; and added, in order to practise her English, "Comic small!" Then she did as she was told.

That night Nancy quarrelled with "Baby Bunting." She sat up in bed with flushed cheeks and small, tight fists, and said to Fräulein Müller: "Do not tell me that any more."

Fräulein, who had been droning on in the dusk over her knitting, and thinking that at this hour in Düsseldorf her sister and mother were eating _belegte Brödchen_, looked up in surprise.

"What it is, mein Liebchen?"

"Do not tell me any more about that rabbit. I cannot hear about him any more. You keep on--you keep on till I am ill."

Fräulein Müller was much troubled in suggesting other songs. She tried one or two with scant success.

Nancy sat up again. "All those silly words tease me. Sing without saying them."

So Fräulein hummed uncertain tunes with her lips closed, and she was just drifting into Beethoven, when Nancy sat up once more:

"Oh, don't do that!" she said. "Say words without those silly noises. Say pretty words until I go to sleep."

So Fräulein, after she had tried all the words she could think of, took Lenau's poems from her own bookshelf, and read Nancy to sleep. On the following evenings she read the "Waldlieder," and then "Mischka," until it was finished. Then she started Uhland; and after Uhland, Körner, and Freiligrath, and Lessing.

Who knows what Nancy heard? Who knows what visions and fancies she took with her to her dreams? In the little sleep-boat where Baby Bunting used to be with her, now sat a row of German poets, long of hair, wild of eye, fulgent of epithet. Night after night, for months and years, little Nancy drifted off to her slumber with lyric and lay, with ode and epic, lulled by cadenced rhythm and resonant rhyme. On one of these nights the poets cast a spell over her. They rowed her little boat out so far that it never quite touched shore again.

And Nancy never quite awoke from her dreams.

V

In Milan the cross-grained old architect, Giacomo Tirindelli, Valeria's "Zio Giacomo," stout of figure and short of leg, got up in the middle of the night and went to his son Antonio's room.

The room was empty. He had expected this, but he was none the less incensed. He went to the window and threw the shutters open. Milan slept. Silent and deserted, Via Principe Amedeo lay at his feet. Every alternate lamp already extinguished showed that it was past twelve o'clock; and a dreary cat wandered across the road, making the street emptier for its presence.

Zio Giacomo closed the window, and walked angrily up and down his son's room. On the walls, on the mantelpiece, on the desk, were photographs--Nunziata Villari as Theodora, in stiff regal robes; Nunziata Villari as Cleopatra, clad in jewels; Nunziata Villari as Marguerite Gautier, in her nightdress, or so it appeared to Zio Giacomo's angry eyes; Villari as Norah; Villari as Sappho; Villari as Francesca. Then, in a corner, in an old frame, the portrait of a little girl: _"My Cousin Valeria, twelve years old."_ Zio Giacomo stopped with a short angry sigh before the picture of his favourite niece, whom he had hoped one day to call his daughter. "Foolish girl," he grumbled, "to marry that idiotic Englishman instead of my stupid, disobedient son----" Then another profile of Nunziata Villari caught his eye, and then again Nunziata Villari, all hair and smile.... Zio Giacomo had time to learn the strange, strong face by heart before he heard the street-door fall to, and his son's footsteps on the stairs.

Antonio, who from the street had seen the light in his room, entered with a cheerful smile. "Well, father," he said, "why are you not asleep?" He received the inevitable counter-question with a little Latin gesture of both hands (the gesture that Theodora specially liked!). "Well, father dear, I am twenty-three, and you are--you are not;" and he patted his father's small shoulder and laughed (his best laugh--the laugh that Cleopatra could not resist).

"Jeune homme qui veille, vieillard qui dort, sont tous deux près de la mort," quoted his father, in deep stern tones.

"Eh! father mine, if life is to be short, let it be pleasant," said Antonio, lighting a cigarette.

Giacomo sat very straight; his dressing-gown was tight, and his feet were chilly. His good-looking, good-tempered son irritated him.

"Are you not ashamed?" he said, pointing a dramatic forefinger at the row of portraits. "She is an old woman of fifty!"

"Thirty-eight," said Antonio, seating himself in the armchair.

"An actress! a masquerading mountebank, whom every porter with a franc in his pocket can see when he will; a creature whose husband has run away from her to the ends of the earth----"

"To South America," interpolated Antonio.

--"With the cook." And Zio Giacomo snorted with indignation.

"I am afraid her cooking _is_ bad," said Antonio; and he blew rings of smoke and puckered up his young red mouth in the way that made Phædra flutter and droop her passion-shaded lids.

"I have enough of it," said his father, "and we leave for England to-morrow."

"For England? To-morrow?" Antonio started up. "You don't mean it! You can't mean it, father! Why to England?"

"I telegraphed yesterday to Hertfordshire. I told your cousin Valeria we should come to see them; and she has answered that she is delighted, and her mother is delighted, and everybody is delighted." Zio Giacomo nodded a stubborn head. "We shall stay in England three months, six months, until you have recovered from your folly."

"Ah! because of Cousin Valeria. I see!" and Antonio laughed. "Oh, father, father! you dear old dreamer! Are you at the old dream again? It cannot be, believe me; it was a foolish idea of yours years ago. Valeria was all eyes for her Englishman then, and is probably all tears for him now. Stay here and be comfortable, father!"

But his father would not stay there, and he would not be comfortable. He went away shaking his head, and losing his slipper on the way, and dropping candle-grease all over the carpet in stooping to pick it up. A sore and angry Zio Giacomo got into bed, and tried to read the _Secolo_, and listened to hear if the street-door banged again.

It banged again.

One o'clock struck as Antonio turned down Via Monte Napoleone, and when he rang the bell at No. 36, the _portinaio_ kept him waiting ten minutes. Then Marietta, the maid, kept him waiting fifteen minutes on the landing before she opened the door; and then the Signora kept him waiting fifteen eternities until she appeared, white-faced and frightened, draped in white satin, with her hair bundled up anyhow--or nearly anyhow--on the top of her head.

Antonio took both her hands and kissed them, and pressed them to his eyes, and told her he was leaving to-morrow--no, to-day--to-day! In a few hours! For ever! For England! And what would she do? She would be false! She would betray him! She was infamous! He knew it! And would she die with him now?

She gave the little Tosca scream, and turned from him with the second act "Dame aux Camelias" shiver, and stepped back like Fedora, and finally flung herself, like Francesca, upon his breast. Then she whispered five words to him, and sent him home.

She called Marietta, who loosened her hair again, and plaited it, and put away what was not wanted, and gave her the lanoline; and she greased her face and went to bed like Nunziata Villari, aged thirty-eight.

But Antonio went through the nocturnal streets, repeating the five words: "London. In May. Twelve performances." And this was March.

Enough! He would live through it somehow. "Aber fragt mich nur nicht wie," he said to himself, for he knew enough German to quote Heine's "Buch der Lieder," and he had read "Die Jungfrau von Orleans" in the original, in order to discuss it with La Villari.

La Villari liked to discuss her rôles with him. She also practised her attitudes and tried her gestures on him without his knowing it. He always responded, as a violin that one holds in one's hand thrills and responds when another violin is played. When she was studying Giovanna d'Arco, he felt that he was le Chevalier Bayard, and he dreamed of an heroic life and an epic death. When she was preparing herself for the rôle of Clelia, and practising the attitudes of that famous adventuress, he became a sceptic and a _noceur_, and gave Zio Giacomo qualms for three weeks by keeping late hours and gambling all night at the Patriottica. When she took up the rôle of Messalina, and for purposes of practice assumed Messalina attitudes and expounded Messalina views, he drifted into a period of extreme demoralization, and became perverted and blasphemous. But during the six weeks in which she arrayed her mind in the candid lines of La Samaritana, he became once more spiritual and pure: he gave up the Patriottica and the Café Biffi, and went to early Mass every morning.

"You funny boy!" said Villari to him one day. "You will do foolish things in your life. Why don't you work?"

"I don't know," said Antonio. "I am in the wrong set, I suppose. And, besides, there is no time. After a canter on the Bastioni in the morning, it is lunch-time; and after luncheon one reads or goes out; and then it is visiting-time--the Marchesa Adda expects one every Monday, and the Della Rocca every Tuesday, and somebody else every Wednesday.... Then it is dinner-time and theatre-time and bed-time. And there you are!"

"It is a pity," said La Villari, kindly maternal, forgetting to be Messalina, or Giovanna, or anyone else. "You have no character. You are nice; you are good to look at; you are not stupid. But your nose is, as one would say, a nose of putty--yes, of putty! And anyone can twist it here and there. Take care! You will suffer much, or you will make other people suffer. Noses of putty," she added thoughtfully, "are fountains of grief."

Zio Giacomo was one whose nose was not of putty. Much as he hated journeys, many as were the things that he always lost on them, sorely as his presence was needed in his office, where the drawings for a new town hall were lying in expectant heaps on his desk, he had made up his mind to start for England, and start they should. He packed off his motherless daughter, the tall and flippant Clarissa, to a convent school in Paris, bade good-bye to his sister Carlotta and to his niece Adèle, and scrambled wrathfully into the train for Chiasso, followed by the unruffled Antonio.

Antonio seemed to enjoy the trip; and soon Zio Giacomo found himself wondering why they had taken it. Was the tale that his niece Adèle had told him about Antonio's infatuation for the actress all foolish nonsense? Adèle was always exaggerating.

Zio Giacomo watched his son with growing anger. Antonio was cheerful and debonair. Antonio slept when his father was awake; Antonio ate when his father was sick. By the time they reached Dover Giacomo, who knew no word of English but _rosbif_ and the _Times_, was utterly broken. But Antonio twisted up his young moustache, and ran his fingers through his tight black curls, and made long eyes at the English girls, who smiled, and then passed hurriedly, pretending they had not seen him.

VI

At Charing Cross to meet them were Valeria and Edith--both charming, small-waisted, and self-conscious. Valeria flung herself with Latin demonstrativeness into her old uncle's arms, while Edith tried not to be ashamed of the noise the Italian new-comers made and of the attention they attracted. When, later, they were all four in the train on their way to Wareside, she gave herself up entirely to the rapture of watching Uncle Giacomo's gestures and Cousin Antonio's eyes. Cousin Antonio, whom Valeria addressed as Nino, spoke to her in what he called "banana-English," and was so amusing that she laughed until she coughed, and coughed until she cried; and then they all said they would not laugh any more. And altogether it was a delightful journey.

When they alighted at the peaceful country station, there was Mrs. Avory and little Nancy and the grandfather awaiting them; and there were more greetings and more noise. And when the carriage reached the Grey House, Fräulein stood at the door step, all blushes and confusion, with a little talcum-powder sketchily distributed over her face, and her newly-refreshed Italian vocabulary issuing jerkily from her.

They were a very cheerful party at tea; everybody spoke at once, even the old grandfather, who kept on inquiring, "Who are they--who are they?"--addressing himself chiefly to Zio Giacomo--at intervals during the entire afternoon. Towards evening Nancy became excited and unmanageable, and Mrs. Avory went to bed with a headache. But Fräulein entertained Zio Giacomo, and Nino sat at the piano and sang Neapolitan songs to Valeria and Edith, who listened, sitting on one stool, with arms interlaced.

Then followed days of tennis and croquet, of picnics and teas with the Vicar's pretty daughters and the Squire's awkward sons. Mrs. Avory had only brief glimpses of Valeria and Edith darting indoors and out again; running up to their rooms to change their skirts; calling through the house for their racquets. Zio Giacomo walked about the garden, giving advice to Fräulein about the cultivation of tomatoes, and wondering why English people never ate macaroni.

"Nor _Knodel_," said Fräulein.

"Nor _risotto_," said Zio Giacomo.

"Nor _Leberwurst_," said Fräulein.

"Nor _cappelletti al sugo_," said Zio Giacomo.

"It is so as with the etucation," said Fräulein. "The etucation is again already quite wrong; not only the eating and the cooking of the foot...." And so they rambled along. And Zio Giacomo was homesick.

Suddenly Valeria was homesick too. It began on the first day of the tennis tournament--a resplendent light-blue day. Nino said that the sky matched Edith's dress and also her eyes, which reminded him of Lake Como. Their partnership was very successful; Edith, airy and swift, darted and flashed across the court, playing almost impossible balls. In the evening, as she lay back in the rocking-chair, pale and sweet, with her shimmering hair about her, Nino called her a tired butterfly, and sang "La Farfalla" to her. Valeria was miserable. She said it was homesickness. She felt that she was homesick for the sun of Italy and the language of Italy; homesick for people with loud voices and easy gesticulations and excitable temperaments; homesick for people with dark eyes and dark hair.

On the second day of the tournament, at tea on the Vicar's lawn, she became still more homesick. Her partner was offering her cress-sandwiches, and telling her that it was very warm for April, and that last year in April it had been much colder. Meanwhile, she could see Nino at the other side of the lawn tuning a guitar that had been brought to him; he was laughing and playing chords on it with his teaspoon. Edith and two other girls stood near him; their three fair heads shone in the sunlight. Suddenly Valeria felt as if she could not breathe in England any more. She said to herself that it must be the well-bred voices, the conversation about the weather, the trimness, the tidiness, the tea, the tennis, that were insufferable to her chagrined heart. Meanwhile her dark eyes rested upon Nino and upon the three blonde heads, inclined towards him, and glistening in different sheens of gold. She felt hot tears pricking her eyes.

That evening in her room, as they were preparing for bed, Edith talked to her sister-in-law through the open door. "What fun everything is, Val, isn't it?" she said, shaking out her light locks, and brushing them until they crackled and flew, and stood out like pale fire round her face. "Life is a delightful institution!"

As no answer came from Valeria's room, Edith looked in. Valeria was lying on her bed, still in her pink evening dress, with her face hidden in the pillow.

"Why? What has happened, dear?" asked Edith, bending over the dark bowed head.

"Oh, I hate everything!" murmured Valeria. "That horrid tennis, and those horrid girls, always laughing, always laughing, always laughing."

Edith sat down beside her. "But we laughed, too--at least, I know _I_ did! And as for Nino, he laughed all the time."

"That is it," cried Valeria, sitting up, tearful and indignant. "In Italy Nino never laughed. In Italy we do not laugh for nothing, just to show our teeth and pretend we are vivacious."

Edith was astonished. She sat for a long while looking at Valeria's disconsolate figure, and thinking matters over. Quite suddenly she bent down and kissed Valeria, and said: "Don't cry." So Valeria, who had left off crying, began to cry again. And still more she cried when she raised her head and saw Edith's shower of scintillant hair, and the two little Lakes of Como brimming over with limpid tears. They kissed each other, and called themselves silly and goose-like; and then they laughed and kissed each other again, and went to bed.

Valeria fell asleep.

But Edith lay thinking in the dark.

She got up quite early, and took little Nancy primrosing in the woods; so Nino and Valeria went to the tennis tournament alone. A fat, torpid girl took Edith's place, and Valeria laughed all the morning.

Edith and Nancy came in from the woods late for luncheon. When they appeared, Nino looked up at Edith in surprise. Mrs. Avory said: "Edith, my dear, what have you done? You look a sight!"

"Do I?" said Edith. "Why, this is the famous North-German coiffure Fräulein has made me."

Valeria's face had flushed. "You ought not to have let her drag your hair back so tight," she said. And Mrs. Avory added: "I thought you had given that ugly brown dress away long ago."

Then Nancy spoke of the primroses and Nino of the tennis; and Edith kept and adopted the North-German coiffure. She dropped out of the tournament because it gave her a pain in her shoulders, and she went for long walks with Nancy.

Nancy was good company. Edith grew to look forward to the walks and to the warm clasp of Nancy's little hand in hers, and the sound of Nancy's treble voice beside her. Nancy asked few questions. She preferred not to know what things were. She had never liked fireworks after she had seen them in the day-time packed in a box. What! they were not baby stars? All Fräulein's definitions of things and of phenomena were painful to her mind as to her ear. But the seventeen years of Edith and the eight springtimes of the child kept step harmoniously. Nancy's dawning spirit, urged by a presaging flame, pressed forward to its morning; while Edith's early day, chilled by an unseen blight, turned back, and stopped before its noon. Her springtide faded before its flowering.

Thus the two girl-souls met, and their love bloomed upwards in concord like two flames.

On Easter Sunday Fräulein entered late for luncheon, and Nancy did not come at all. Fräulein apologized for her: "Nancy is in the summer-house writing a poetry. She says she will not have any lunch."

Mrs. Avory laughed, and Nino said: "What is the poetry about?"

"I think," replied Fräulein, shaking out her table-napkin, and tucking it carefully into her collar, "it is about her broken doll and her dead canary."

"Is the canary dead?" exclaimed Valeria. "Why did you not tell me?"

"She shall have a new doll," said Mrs. Avory, "at once."

"But it isn't--she hasn't--they are not!" explained Fräulein, much confused. "Only she says she cannot write a poetry about things that are not broken and dead."

The old grandfather, who now rarely spoke, raised his head, and said mournfully, "Broken and dead--broken and dead," and went on repeating the words all through lunch, until he was coaxed and scolded into silence.

There was much excitement over Nancy's poem that afternoon. It was read aloud by Edith, and then by Valeria, and then by Fräulein, and then again by Edith. Valeria improvised a translation of it into Italian for Zio Giacomo and Nino; and then it was read aloud once more by Edith. Everybody laughed and wept; and then Valeria kissed everybody. Nancy was a genius! They had always known it. Zio Giacomo said that it was in his brother's family; whereupon Mrs. Avory said, "Indeed?" and raised her eyebrows and felt hurt. But how--said Valeria--had it come into Nancy's head to write a poem? And what if she were never to be able to write another? Such things had happened. Could she try again and write something else? Just now! Oh, anything!... Saying how she wrote this poem, for instance!

So little Nancy, all flushed and wild and charming, extemporized in Fräulein's note-book:

"This morning in the orchard I chased the fluttering birds: The winging, singing things I caught-- Were words!

"This morning in the garden Where the red creeper climbs, The vagrant, fragrant things I plucked-- Were rhymes!

"This morning in the...."

Nancy looked up and bit her lip. "This morning--in the what?"

"In the garden," suggested Valeria.

"I have already said that," frowned Nancy.

Zio Giacomo suggested "kitchen," and was told to keep quiet. Edith said "woodlands," and that was adopted. Then Nancy found out that she wanted something quite different, and could they give her a rhyme for "verse"?

"Curse," said Nino.

"Disburse," said Fräulein.

"Oh, that is not poetic, but rather the reverse!" cried Nancy.

"Terse," said Edith.

"Purse," said Nino.

"Hearse," said the old grandfather gloomily.

Nancy laughed. "We go from bad to worse," she exclaimed, dimpling and blushing. "Wait a minute."

"And if I cage the birdlings...."

"What birdlings?" said Fräulein.

"Why, the words that I caught in the orchard," said Nancy hurriedly.

Everybody looked vague. "Why do you want to cage them?" asked Fräulein, who had a tidy mind.

"Because," said Nancy excitedly, making her reasons while she spoke, "words must not be allowed to fly about anyhow as they like--they must be caught, and shut in lines; they must be caged by the--by the----"

"The rhythm," suggested Edith.

"What is that?" said Nancy.

"The measure, the time, as in music."

"Yes, that's it!" said Nancy.

"And if the flowers I nurse...."

"The flowers are the rhymes, of course," explained Nancy, flourishing her pencil triumphantly.

"And if the flowers I nurse, The rambling, scrambling things I write-- Are verse!"

"Beautiful! wonderful!" cried everybody; and Uncle Giacomo and Nino clapped their hands a long time, as if they were at the theatre.

When they left off, Mrs. Avory said: "I do not quite like those last lines. They are not clear. But, of course, they are quite good enough for poetry!" she added. And everyone agreed. Mrs. Avory said she thought they ought to have somebody, some poet, down from London at once to teach the child seriously. And Fräulein went into long details about publishers in Berlin, and how careful one must be if one prints a volume of poems not to let them cheat you.

From that day onward the spirit of Nancy's inspiration ruled the house. Everybody was silent when she came into the room, lest her ideas should be disturbed; meals must wait until Nancy had finished thinking. When Nancy frowned and passed her hand across her forehead in a little quick gesture she often used, Edith would quietly shut the windows and the doors, so that nothing should disturb the little poetess, and no butterfly-thought of hers should fly away. Valeria hovered round, usually followed by Nino; and Fräulein, in the library, read long chapters of Dante to Zio Giacomo, whether he slept or not, in order, as she put it in her diary: "(_a_) To practise my Italian; (_b_) to keep in the house the atmosphere of the Spirit of Poetry."

But the grandfather, who could not understand the silence and the irregular meals, thought that somebody had died, and wandered drearily about, opening doors to see if he could find out who it was. And he frequently made Mrs. Avory turn sick and chilly by asking her suddenly, when she sat at her work, "Who is dead in the house?"

VII

Meanwhile Nunziata Villari in Milan was flustering the maid Marietta over the packing of her trunks, and getting ready to leave for her twelve performances in England.

Nino had written to her twice a day during the first week of his absence; every two days during the second week; only once in the third week; and in this, the fourth week, not at all. "Some stupid English girl has turned his nose of putty from me," mused La Villari, and scolded Marietta for what she had packed, and for what she had not packed, and for how she had packed it. But La Villari was mistaken. No stupid English girl had turned Nino's nose of putty from her. Edith, who might have done so had she willed, had chosen to stab his nascent passion with the hairpins that fixed the North-German coiffure at its most unbecoming angle half-way up her head. She had left him to himself, and gone off primrosing with Nancy, whose love--the blind, far-seeing love of a child--depended not on a tendril of hair, or the tint of a cheek, or the glance of an eye.

Nino, standing alone, looking vaguely round for adoration, met Valeria's deep eyes fixed on him; and, suddenly remembering that this little cousin of his had been destined to his arms since both their childhood, he let his heart respond to her timid call. As she bent her head over a letter to her cousin Adèle, Nino watched her with narrowing eyes. Had Fate not sent Tom Avory, the tall and leisurely Englishman, bronzed and fair, sauntering into her life and his years ago, painting pictures, quoting poets, rowing her and Zio Giacomo about the lake, this dark, graceful head, thought Nino would have found its resting-place against his own breast; the little dimpled hand, the slender shoulders--all would belong to him. Had he not always loved her? He asked himself the question in all sincerity, quite forgetting his brief and violent fancy for Cousin Adèle, and his longer and more violent passion for Nunziata Villari. True, he would never have noticed Adèle had she not sighed at him first. And he would certainly never have loved La Villari had she not looked at him first. But now--Adèle was nowhere; and La Villari was in Milan packing her trunks; and here was Valeria, with her dark head and her dimples.

"Valerietta!" he said; and she raised her eyes. "It is May-day. Come out into the fields."

So Valeria put away her letter, and went to look for her hat. As she passed the schoolroom she heard voices, and peeped in. There was her little Nancy, pen in hand, wild-eyed and happy, and Edith bending over her, reading half-aloud what the inspired child-poet had just written.

"I am going into the fields with Nino," said Valeria. "Edith dear, won't you come, too?"

"Oh no! It is too windy," said her sister-in-law. "The wind takes my breath away and makes me cough. Besides, Nancy could not spare me."

"No!" said Nancy, laying her pink cheek against Edith's arm and smiling, "I could not spare her!"

Valeria laughed, and blew a kiss to them both. Then she ran upstairs for her hat, and went out across the fields with Nino.

Adjoining the schoolroom was the drawing-room where Mrs. Avory and the grandfather were sitting together in silence. "Sally's cough is worse," said the grandfather suddenly.

(The Fates were spinning. _"Here is a black thread,"_ said One. _"Weave it in,"_ said the Other. And the Third sharpened her scissors.)

"Sally's cough is worse," said the grandfather again.

Mrs. Avory looked up from her crocheting. "Hush, father dear!" she said.

"I said Sally's cough is worse," repeated the old man. "I hear it every night."

"No, dear; no, dear," said Mrs. Avory. "Not poor Sally. Sally has been at rest many years. Perhaps you mean Edith. She has a little cold."

"I know Sally's cough," said the old man.

Mrs. Avory put her work down and folded her hands. A slow, icy shiver crept over her and enveloped her like a wet sheet.

"Sally is my favourite grandchild," continued her father, shaking his white head. "Poor little Sally--poor little Sally!"

Mrs. Avory sat still. Terror, heavy and cold, crawled like a snake into her heart. "Edith! It is Edith!" she said.

_"It is Sally!"_ cried the old man, rising to his feet. "I remember Sally's cough, and in the night I hear it."

There was a moment's silence. Then in the schoolroom Edith coughed. The grandfather came close to his daughter. "There," he whispered, "that is Sally. And you told me she was dead."

Mrs. Avory rose tremblingly to her feet. In her eyes was the vision of her tragic children, all torn to death by the shuddering and insidious Ill that crouched in their breasts and clutched at their throats, and sprang upon them and strangled them when they reached the threshold of their youth. And now Edith, too? Edith, her last-born!

She raised her eyes of Madre Dolorosa to her father's face. Then she fell fainting before him, her grey head at his feet.

* * * * *

Out in the fields, that were alight with daisies, Nino took Valeria's hand and drew her arm through his. "Little cousin," he said, "do you remember how I loved you when you were twelve years old, and scorned me?"

"Yes," laughed Valeria; "and how I loved you when you were sixteen, and had forgotten me."

"But, again," said Nino, "how I loved you when you were eighteen, and refused me."

Valeria looked at him with timorous eyes. "And now I am twenty-seven and a half, and you are only twenty-three."

"True," said Nino. "How young you are! The woman I love is thirty-eight years old."

Valeria's face paled; then it flushed rose-pink, and she laughed. "Thirty-eight! Nearly forty? I don't believe it!" All her pretty teeth shone, and the dimple dipped in her cheek.

"I hardly believe it myself," said Nino, laughing.

"Perhaps it is not true, after all."

Did Zio Giacomo in the library hear with his astral ear his son's gratifying assertion? Fräulein certainly thought that she saw him smile in his sleep, while through her careful lips "Conte Ukolino," in the thirty-third canto of the "Inferno," gnawed noisomely at the Archbishop's ravaged skull.

"Are you sure that she is not seventeen?" asked Valeria, biting a blade of grass, and glancing up sideways at her cousin's face.

Nino stopped. "'She?' Who? Why? Who is seventeen?" he asked.

"Edith," breathed Valeria.

Nino shook his head. "No, not Edith, poor little thing!" Then he bent forward and kissed Valeria decisively and authoritatively long before she expected it.

"Why did you call Edith a poor little thing?" asked Valeria, when she had forgiven him, and been kissed again.

Nino looked grave, and tapped his chest with his finger. _"È tisica!"_ he said.

Valeria started back, and dragged her hands from his. "Tisica!" Her heart stopped beating, and then galloped off like a bolting horse. "Tisica!" In the terrible half-forgotten word the memory of Tom and the tragic past flamed up again. Yes; Edith had a cough. But everybody in England coughed. Edith--Edith, with her fair hair and pink cheeks! It was not true! It could not be true. Sweet, darling Edith, with the hideous North-German coiffure that she had made for Valeria's sake! Edith, little Nancy's best friend! Ah, _Nancy!_... Valeria's thought, like some maddened quarry, darted off in another direction. Nancy! Nancy! She was with Edith now! She was always with Edith, laughing, talking, bending over the same book, kissing her good-night and good-morning.

"I must go back," said Valeria suddenly, with a face grown pinched and small. Nino held her tight.

"What is it, love of mine?" he said.

"The baby!" gasped Valeria, with a sob. Nancy was the baby again. The baby that had to be taken away from danger--from Tom first, and now from Edith. It was the baby for whom she had run across these fields one morning years ago, tripping and stumbling in her haste, leaving what perhaps was love behind her, lest the baby should be hungry, lest the baby should cry. And now again she ran, tripping and stumbling in her haste, leaving what perhaps was love behind her. Nancy must be saved. What if it were too late! What if Nancy had already breathed the blight? If Nancy, too, were soon to begin to cough ... to cough, and clear her throat, and perspire in the night, and have her temperature taken twice a day, and then one day--one day her eyes frightened, her fists clenched, and her mouth full of blood.... Valeria held her hands to her cheeks, crying aloud, as she tottered and ran across the flowering fields.

When she reached the garden there was Nancy, standing on the swing, alone--swinging and singing, with her curls all ablow.

"Fräulein came out and called Edith away," said the child, with a little pout. "She said I was not to come. Perhaps somebody has arrived. Could it be the poet from London?"

"Not yet, dear," said Valeria, voiceless, and with hammering heart. She embraced the little black legs standing on the swing, and laid her throbbing temple against the child's pinafore. "Ave Maria, Mater Dei, Ora pro nobis," she murmured.

"Go out of the way, mother dear, and see how high I swing," said Nancy. Valeria stepped aside; then she saw Fräulein's face appear at the drawing-room window and Fräulein's hand beckoning to her to come in.

"I must go indoors for a moment. Don't swing too high, darling," cried Valeria, and hurried into the house.

When she entered the drawing-room her heart stood still. Mrs. Avory was on the sofa, with grey lips and trembling hands. Fräulein stood by her, holding smelling-salts and a saucer of vinegar; while Edith, kneeling beside her, was crying: "Mother darling! mother darling! are you better?" In a corner stood the grandfather and Zio Giacomo, looking bewildered and alarmed.

"What has happened?" cried Valeria.

"She fainted," whispered Edith, with a sob, as she kissed and chafed the cold hands. Then her mother's arm went round her neck, and her mother's tears rained on her.

"Edith, my little girl, my own little girl!" she cried.

Valeria wept with her, and Edith wept too, little knowing the reason of her mother's tears.

... Out in the garden Nancy was alone, swinging and singing, with her curls all ablow, when the German poet's spell came over her.

"Die linden Lüfte sind erwacht, Sie säuseln und wehen Tag und Nacht, Sie kommen von allen Enden...."

The poets murmured it in her ear. Through the darkening trees beyond the lawn she could see a gilt line where the sunset struck its light in the sky.

"Die Welt wird schöner mit jeden Tag, Man weiss nicht was noch werden mag, Das Blühen will nicht enden!"

Nancy slipped from the swing. The poets were whispering and urging. Had not Fräulein in yesterday's lessons taught her the wonderful fact that the world was a round star, swinging in the blue, with other stars above it and below it? If one walked to the edge of the world, just to where it curves downward into roundness, and if one bent forward--holding to a tree, perhaps, so as not to fall--surely one would be able to look down into the sky and see the stars circling beneath one's feet! Nancy felt that she must go to the edge of the world and look down. The edge of the world! She could see it! It was behind the trees beyond Millpond Farm, where the sun had dipped down and left the horizon ablaze. So Nancy went out of her garden to go to the edge of the world.

When Mrs. Avory had been tenderly helped to a seat in the garden, and had had a footstool and a pillow, and some eau de Cologne, Edith said:

"Where is Nancy?"

"Where is Nancy?" said Valeria.

Fräulein called through the garden and through the house. Then Valeria called through the house and through the garden, and Edith ran upstairs, and through all the rooms and into the attics, and down again into the garden and to the summer-house and the shrubbery. Nino came in, and was sent to the village to see if Nancy was there. But Nancy was not there, nor had anyone seen her. Zio Giacomo and the stable-boy set out in one direction, and Jim Brown in another. Nino went across the fields towards the station--you could hear his call and his whistle for miles--and Florence went out and past the chapel along the road to Fern Glen. Valeria, wringing her hands, ran out after Florence, telling Edith to stay in, and mind and take care of Mrs. Avory and the grandfather.

But Edith put on her hat, and said to Mrs. Avory: "I shall be back directly. Stay here quite quietly, mother dear, and mind you get Fräulein to look after you and grandfather."

But her mother would not let her go alone. No, no; she would go, too! So they both started out towards Baker's End, telling Fräulein to mind and stay indoors, and look after grandfather.

But Fräulein, who had recently read "Misunderstood," was suddenly seized by a horrible thought regarding the water-lilies on Castlebury Pond, and she went out quickly, just stopping to tell the cook to prepare dinner and to mind and look after the grandfather. But the cook ran across to Smith's Farm, and the scullery-maid went with her.

The grandfather remained alone in the silent house.

(The Fates were spinning. _"Here is a black thread. Weave it in."_)

The grandfather was alone in the silent house. He called his daughter; he called Valeria, and Edith, and Nancy. Then he remembered that Nancy was lost. He called Sally; he called Tom; he rang the bells. Nobody came; nobody answered. Then again he remembered that Nancy was lost, and that everyone had gone to look for her. He opened the front-door and walked down the avenue; he opened the gate and looked up and down the deserted road. Then he stepped out and turned to the left, away from the village, and went towards the cross-roads at Heather's Farm; but before he reached them he crossed the field to the left, and went past Wakeley's Ditch towards the heath.

The sun had dropped out of sight, and night, soft-footed and grey, was stealing like a cat across the meadows; and Jim Brown had found Nancy on Three Cedars Hill when the old grandfather left the heath and turned his slow footsteps into the dark and silent fields. He saw something waving and moving against the sky.

"That is Nancy," he said, and called her. But it was a threshing-machine, covered with black cloths that moved in the wind. And the grandfather hurried a little when he passed it. He said aloud: "I am eighty-seven years old." He felt that nothing would hurt him that knew this, and the threshing-machine let him pass, and did not follow with its waving rags, as he had feared. Then some sheep penned in a fold startled him, running towards him with soft hoofs, bleating and standing still suddenly, with black faces turned towards him. As he tottered on something started up and ran away from him, and then it ran after him and darted past him. He was chilled with fear.

"I am eighty-seven years old. It is not right that I should be alone in the night," he said; and he began to cry whiningly like a little child. But nobody heard him, and he was afraid of the noises he made.

He turned to go home, and passed the shrouded machine again, and then in a field to the right he saw someone standing and moving.

"Have you seen Nancy?" he cried. "Hullo! Good-evening! Is Nancy there?"

The figure in the field beckoned to him, and he went stumbling in the ruts. When he got near, he said: "I am eighty-seven years old."

The figure waved both arms, greatly impressed; and the grandfather sat down on the ground, for he was tired.

Nancy had reached home, and the lights were lit and voices rang through the house; but the grandfather sat on the hill-side in the dark, and talked to the scarecrow.

"When you go home, sir, I shall go with you," said the grandfather, and the scarecrow made no objection. "You will tell me when you are ready to go."

But as the figure waved to him to wait, the grandfather tried not to be cross. "All right, all right," he said. "I am in no hurry." But it was very cold.

Suddenly across the hill, with long light steps, came Tom, and Tom's son Tom; and all his dead grandchildren came down the hill with long, light steps and sat around him. And the darker it grew the closer they sat. Sally, who was the favourite, laid her head against his arm, and he could touch her cool face with his hand.

He asked if they had seen Nancy, but they had not; and he asked Sally how her cough was. But they all laughed softly, and did not answer. The threshing-machine passed, waving its wings, and his dead children sat with him through the night. Before dawn they rose up and left him, crossing the hill again with light, long steps.

But the scarecrow stayed with him till he slept.

(_"Cut the thread,"_ said Fate.)

VIII

A fortnight after the funeral Nino twisted up his moustache and went to London. His father had made no objection; indeed, Zio Giacomo himself found everything exaggeratedly doleful, and Valeria, in her black dress, going about the house with the expression of a hunted cat, annoyed him exceedingly. She was always jumping up in the midst of any conversation, and running out to look for Nancy.

What if Fräulein happened to be busy with Mrs. Avory or with the servants? said her uncle angrily. Surely there was Edith always with the child, petting her and spoiling her. Valeria need not worry so! But Valeria worried. She paid no attention to Zio Giacomo, never even gave him the promised _minestrone freddo_ on his birthday, and Nino might have ceased to exist so far as she was concerned. She seemed to be always looking at Nancy or looking at Edith. When the two sat happily together, reading or talking, she would call Nancy with a rough strained voice, hurriedly sending the child on some useless errand, or keeping her by her side and making long foolish talk with her. Edith sometimes looked up in surprise when Valeria called the child away from her so suddenly and so sternly; but seeing Valeria's pale and anxious face, then glancing over to Nino, who usually looked bored and absent-minded, Edith thought of lovers' quarrels, and asked no questions.

But there was no lovers' quarrel between Nino and Valeria. In Valeria's terror-stricken heart maternal love had pushed all else aside, and only one thought possessed her--the thought of keeping Nancy out of danger, out of reach of Edith's light breath, out of reach of Edith's tender kisses; while Nino, seeing her with little Nancy on her lap or at her side all day, gradually grew to look upon her in the light of Valeria the mother, and lost sight of her as Valeria the betrothed. A child on its mother's breast forbids and restrains passion.

One evening he took up a paper and improved his English by reading the news. The news interested him. It was on the following day that he twisted up his moustache and went to London. He had dinner at Pagani's. There he met Carlo Fioretti, an old fellow-student of his at Pavia, who was dining with a golden-haired Englishwoman at a table near to his. They invited him to drink coffee and _pousse-café_ with them, and Fioretti told Nino that he was doctor to the Italian colony in London, and getting on splendidly. And would he join them at the comedy later on? Nino was sorry--he was really desolated!--but he could not. He was going to the Garrick.

"Oh," cried the fair lady, "to be sure! La Villari is playing there to-night, isn't she? Wonderful creature!" Then she shook an arch forefinger at Fioretti. "Why did you not think of taking me to hear her?"

Fioretti promised to take her the next day, and the day after, and every day, and for ever! Then Nino took his leave with much bowing and hand-kissing, and Fioretti accompanied him as far as the door.

"Who is she?" said Nino.

"A lady of title," said Fioretti. "Divorced."

_"Deliziosa,"_ said Nino.

_"Milionaria,"_ said Fioretti. And having quickly shaken hands with Nino, he hurried back to her.

* * * * *

The seven mourning women in Cossa's tragedy were already chanting their woes when Nino entered the theatre and took his seat in the fourth row of the stalls. His heart opened to the swing and cadence of the Italian words, to the loud sweetness of the Italian voices, to the graceful violence of the Italian gestures. His Latin blood thrilled in understanding and response.

Suddenly Villari was on the stage, and no one else existed. Fervid and lovely, keen and lithe, soon she held in her small, hot hands the hearts of the cool English audience, tightening their nerves, swaying and drawing them into paths of unaccustomed passion. Nino sat still with quick heart-beats, wondering if she would see him.

He remembered the first time that her eyes had met his at the Manzoni in Milan four years ago. She was playing Sappho. He was with his cousin Adèle and Aunt Carlotta in one of the front rows, and they were laughing at the vehemence of the love-scene in the second act, when suddenly he saw that Villari was looking at him. Yes, at him! She gazed at him long and deliberately, while Jean was sobbing at her feet, and she said Daudet's famous words, "Toi tu ne marchais pas encore, que moi déjà je roulais dans les bras des hommes," with her deep and steadfast eyes fixed on Nino's face. She had said the words in French in the midst of the Italian play, for she was whimsical and wilful, and did as she pleased. Then she had turned away, and gone on with her part without noticing him any more. Cousin Adèle had been acid and sarcastic all the evening. The next day--how well he remembered it all!--he had sent Villari flowers, as she intended that he should, and a week after that he had sent her a bracelet, having sold Aunt Carlotta and Adèle's piano during their absence in order to do so.

Now she was before him once more, fervid and lovely, keen and lithe, and Nino sat motionless, with quick heart-beats, wondering if she would see him.

Suddenly she looked straight at him, with long and deliberate gaze--so long, indeed, that he thought everyone must notice it, and he could hardly breathe for the violence of his rushing veins. When the curtain fell he sent his card to her dressing-room, but she did not receive him, nor did she do so at the end of the play. The next day he sent her flowers, as she had intended that he should, but when he called at her hotel she was out. He sat through nine of her twelve performances, and still she would not see him, for she was thirty-eight and wily, and knew men's hearts. She also knew her own, and had more than once thought that she detected symptoms of what she called a _grande passion_, a _toquade_, for this curly-headed, vehement young Nino with the light laugh and the violent eyes. Nunziata Villari dreaded her grand passions. She knew of old how disastrous they were, how unbecoming to her complexion, how ruinous to her affairs, how gnawing during their process, how painful at their end. And she especially dreaded a grand passion for Nino, remembering that he was one who had a nose of putty, and would probably be a fountain of grief. So night after night Nino sat in his stall and watched her, and counted the days that remained before she would go away again. Every night she was different--she was Sappho and Magdalen; she was Norah and Fedora; she was Phædra and Desdemona. Every night she was before him, laughing or weeping, loving or hating, dying delicate deaths. She was terrible and sweet, fierce and alluring; she embraced and she killed; she was resplendent Purity, she was emblazoned Sin; she was _das Ewig Weibliche_, the immortal mistress of all lovers, the ever-desiring and the ever-desired.

When, after her tenth performance, he was allowed to see her in her dressing-room, he could not speak. Without a word of greeting, without responding to her smile, he dropped into a chair and hid his face in his hands, to the great amusement of Marietta the maid.

But Nunziata Villari was not amused. She suddenly realized that she had been acting for this Nino every night, that especially for him she had sobbed and raved, she had laughed and languished; and as she saw him sitting there with his face in his hands, she felt in her heart the intermittent throb that she recognized and dreaded. It was the _grande passion;_ it was the _toquade._ "Ça y est!" she said. "Now I am in love again."

And she was.

IX

In Wareside Fräulein still read Dante to the unwitting Uncle Giacomo. The apple-blossoms fluttered and the sun shone. Butterflies, like blow-away flowers, flitted past Edith as she lay on a couch in the sunshine, too lazy to move, and too peaceful to read; while little Nancy ruffled up her hair and puckered her brow, frightened and gladdened at once by the luxuriance of words and ideas that sang in her brain, that romped out in lines and paired off in rhymes, like children dancing.

And the two mothers sat in the shade and watched.

When Edith called Nancy, and the child ran to her, Valeria's lips tightened, and soon she would call the little girl to her side and keep her. Then Mrs. Avory's face grew hard, and her heart was bitter with grief. She would rise quickly and go to Edith, trying to divert her thoughts by some futile question about her crochet, or a book, or the colour of the sky. Edith would answer, wondering a little, and shut her eyes, too lazy to think.

Over their children's heads the two mothers' glances met, hostile and hard, each shielding her own, each defending and each accusing.

"Edith is ill," said Valeria's eyes. "Nancy must not be near her."

"Edith is ill," said Mrs. Avory's eyes, "but she must not know it."

"Nancy must not be endangered."

"Edith must not be hurt."

"Mother," pipes up Nancy's treble voice suddenly, "do you think May is a girl?"

"Who is May, dear?"

"Why, the month of May. Do you think it is a girl with roses in her arms, dancing across the lands, and touching the hedges into flower?"

"Yes, dear; I think so."

"Or do you think it is a boy, with curls falling over his eyes, wilful and naughty, who drags the little leaves out from the trees, and tosses the birds across the sky, whirling and piping?"

"Yes, I think so, dear."

"Oh, mother, you are not listening!" cries Nancy, and scampers off, improvising as she goes:

"Says May: 'I am a girl! May is short for Margaret, Margaret or Daisy. The petals of a jessamine No boy's hand could unfurl!' Says May: 'I am a girl.'

"Says May: 'I am a boy! May is short for...'"

"For what?" thinks Nancy, frowning impatiently at the word that will not come. Then she skips gaily on across the grass:

"Says May: 'I am a boy! May is short for Marmaduke, As all the world should know! I taught the birds their trills and shakes, No girl could whistle so!'

"So May the girl, and May the boy, they quarrel all day long; While the flowers stop their budding, and the birds forget their song. And God says: 'Now, to punish you, I'll hang out the new moon And take and bundle both of you into the month of June.'"

"Of course, May is _not_ short for Marmaduke," muses Nancy, "but that cannot be helped."

... On her couch on the lawn Edith opened her eyes and said: "Nancy? Where is Nancy?"

Valeria sprang up. "Is there anything you want, Edith dear?"

"No; I should like Nancy. I love to see her, and I am too lazy to run after her."

"I will call her," said Valeria.

At this unexpected reply Mrs. Avory raised eyes shining with gratitude to her daughter-in-law's face.

Valeria found her little girl declaiming verses to the trees in the orchard. She knelt down on the grass to fasten the small button-shoe, and said, without raising her face: "Nancy, you are to go to Edith; but, Nancy, _you are not to kiss her_."

"Oh, mother! has she been naughty?"

"No." Valeria remained on her knees, and put her arm round the child. "Edith is ill," she said slowly.

"Then I will kiss her double," cried Nancy, flushing.

"Nancy, Nancy, try to understand," said Valeria. "Edith is ill, as your father was, and he died; and as her sisters were, and they died. And if you kiss her, you may get ill, too, and die. And every time you kiss her--oh, Nancy, Nancy, child of mine, it is a sword struck into your mother's heart!"

There was a long pause. "And if I refuse to kiss her, will that not be a sword struck into her heart?" asked Nancy.

"Yes," said Valeria.

"And if a sword is in Edith's heart, there will be a sword in grandmother's heart, too?"

"Yes," said Valeria.

A long pause; then Nancy said: "There is a sword for every heart.... I could make a beautiful poetry about that." Her eyes were large, and saw nothing--not her mother, not Edith who was ill--but the bleeding heart of the world, sword-struck and gigantic, and in her ears the lines began to swing and flow.

"Mother of God, help us!" sighed Valeria, shaking her head. "Go to Edith."

Nancy went; and she kissed Edith, because she had forgotten all that her mother had said.

Presently Zio Giacomo came out to them with an open letter in his hand. It was a letter from Nino, and Zio Giacomo's wrath knew no bounds. He called Nino a perfidious traitor and a foolish viper, and an imbecile and the son of an imbecile. He called Valeria a blundering and insensate one, who might have stopped Nino, and kept Nino, and married Nino, and made him behave himself; and Nino was an angel, and no husband would ever be such an angel as Nino would have been as a husband to Valeria. And now the triple extract of insensate imbecility had gone off with an actress, a perfidious, senile snake, who had followed him to England, and it was all Valeria's fault, and Fräulein's fault. Yes, Fräulein was an absurd, moon-struck, German creature, who had turned him, Zio Giacomo, into a preposterous, doddering idiot by reading preposterous, senseless, twaddling Dante's "Inferno" to him all day long.

Fräulein wept, and Valeria wept; but that did not help Zio Giacomo. Nor did it bring back Nino from San Remo, where he was strolling under palm-trees with La Villari; and La Villari was smiling and sighing and melting in the throes of her new _toquade_.

X

Nino, before leaving London, had borrowed some money from Fioretti, who had borrowed it from the lady of title; then he had written to Nunziata Villari's impresario, and cancelled all her engagements; then he wrote to his father, and said he was sorry, and to Valeria, and said he was a miserable hound. After that he started for the Riviera with Nunziata, who was meek and docile and lovely in her incredible hats and unverisimilar gowns.

They were happy in San Remo; but as May was ended, and the weather was hot, Nino suggested spending June in Switzerland; so they went to Lucerne and up to Bürgenstock.

The large hotel was already filled with English-speaking people, and the striking Italian couple was much looked at and discussed. At luncheon their table was set next to a family of Americans--father, mother, and three lovely daughters with no manners. The three girls shook their curls, and laughed in their handkerchiefs, and made inaudible remarks to each other about the new arrivals. In the evening they all three appeared in rose-silk dresses, low-necked and tight-waisted--even the youngest, who looked scarcely fourteen. They carried three Teddy-bears to table with them, and were noisy and giggling and ill-mannered; but their beauty was indescribable. The two eldest wore their red-gold curls pinned on the top of their heads with immense black bows, whereas the youngest had her flowing hair parted in the middle, and it fell like a sheet of gilt water to her waist.

Nino, who sat facing them, twisted up his moustache, and forgot to offer sweets to Nunziata; and Nunziata laughed and talked, and was charming, biting her red lips until they were scarlet, and turning her rings round and round on her delicate fingers.

Then she said--oh, quite casually!--that she had received a letter from Count Jerace that afternoon. Count Jerace? The name of the handsome Neapolitan _viveur_ always grated upon Nino, and he became angry, and made many stinging remarks; whereupon Nunziata, still sweet and patient, biting her red lips until they were scarlet, and turning her rings round and round on her delicate fingers, said that Jerace thought of coming to Bürgenstock towards the end of the week.

Nino pushed his plate aside, and said he would leave the place to-morrow. Then Nunziata laughed and said: "So will I!" and Nino called her an angel, and finished his dinner peacefully.

They left the next day.

They went to Engelberg. In Engelberg there were golf-links and tennis-courts, and English girls in shirt-waists and sailor hats--laughing girls, blushing girls, twittering girls. Engelberg was full of them. Nunziata soon got a letter to say that the Count was thinking of coming to Engelberg, and Nino took her on to Interlaken.

But all Switzerland was a-flower with girlhood. Everybody in the world seemed to be seventeen or eighteen years old. Nunziata would say nervously a hundred times a day:

"What a lovely girl!"

And Nino would ask: "What girl?"

"Why, the girl that just passed us."

Nino had not seen her.

"But you must have seen her," insisted Nunziata.

No; Nino had not seen anybody. He never did. But Nunziata saw everyone. Every uptilted profile, every golden head, every flower-like figure, every curve of every young cheek, struck thorns and splinters into her hurting heart. She wore her incredible gowns and her unverisimilar hats, but they seemed strange and out of place in Switzerland; and the brief-skirted, tennis-playing girls, passing in twos and threes in the cruel June sunshine, with their arms round each other's waists, would turn and look after her and smile.

Soon Nunziata felt that what had been a caprice for four years, while she had had her rôles and her audiences, her impresarios and her critics, her adorers and her enemies to distract her, was a caprice no longer. What had been merely a _toquade_, to laugh at and to talk about, was no more a _toquade_. The fire had flamed up, and was a conflagration; it was, indeed, _la grande passion_. And Nino was alone in her world. Nino was not Nino to her any more. He was youth itself, he was love, he was life, he was all that she had had in the fulness of her past, all that would soon slip from her for ever. And her heart grew bitter, as does the heart of every woman who is older than the man she loves. Her thirty-eight years were to her as a wound of shame. Sometimes, when he looked at her, she would bend forward and put her hands over his eyes. "Don't look at me! don't look at me!" And when he laughed and drew her hands aside, she murmured: "Your eyes are my enemies. I dread them." For she knew that his eyes would gaze upon and desire all the beauty and the youngness of the world.

Late one afternoon they sat on their balcony, while an Italian orchestra in the gardens beneath them played some Sicilian music that they loved.

Nunziata spoke her thought. "Are you not tiring of me, Nino? Oh, Nino! are you sure you are not tiring of me yet?"

"Yet?" exclaimed Nino. "I shall never tire of you--never!"

"Ils faisaient d'éternels serments!..." murmured Nunziata, with a bitter smile.

Nino grasped her white helpless hands. "Why will you not be happy?" he said; for he knew her heart.

"I do not know," said Nunziata.

"You are unhappy. I feel it--I feel it all through the day, even when you laugh," said Nino. "Would you be happier without me?"

"Neither with you nor without you can I live," said Nunziata.

The orchestra was playing Lola's song, and her soul was filled with the hunger of the unattainable and the thirst of death; then, as it was late, she got up with a little sigh, and having powdered her face and patted her hair, and said a little prayer to the Madonna, she slipped her arm through his, and they went down to dinner together.

"I promise I shall not be so foolish again!" she said. "It is absurd; it is morbid!"

But after dinner a girl from Budapest was asked if she would dance. The girl laughed and hesitated; then she vanished for a few minutes, during which time Nunziata turned faint and sick. The girl reappeared, barefooted and lightly draped; then she danced. She danced like the incarnation of spring, and she looked like a blossom blown from the almond-tree. And Nunziata was morbid again.

Nino was in despair. He looked gloomy, and sighed, and quoted Verlaine:

"Mourons ensemble, voulez-vous?"

She laughed a little broken laugh, and quoted the succeeding line:

"Oh! la folle idée!"

And she did not quite mean her laugh, as he did not quite mean his sigh.

Thus the two lovers toyed lightly with thoughts of the grave, while far away, at the Grey House, Death had uncovered his face, and was knocking at the door.

* * * * *

Mrs. Avory had awakened one morning to find the last of her daughters pale, with blood-stained lips, fighting for breath. A doctor, summoned in haste, had said: "Davos!" A knighted specialist from London had repeated: "Davos!"

In less than a week the house was dismantled, the trunks packed, the servants dismissed. Fräulein, all tears, had migrated into an American family staying in the neighbourhood; Valeria, pale and trembling, and little Nancy, sobbing, and clinging to Edith's neck, had said "Good-bye, good-bye!" and had left for Italy with Uncle Giacomo. The tragic mother and daughter turned their steps to the mountains alone.

XI

Davos glistened clear and keen-cut in the winter sunshine, and Edith lay on the southern terrace of the Belvedere, with a rug tucked round her and a parasol over her head. She was happy. Her mother had just brought her a letter from Nancy. Her little niece Nancy, waiting in Italy--waiting just for a short time until Edith should be quite well again--wrote a letter of love and longing, and told Edith to get well quickly. Life without Edith, she wrote, was a horrid nightmare. Italy without Edith was a green splash and a name on the map, but did not really exist at all. Aunt Carlotta and Cousin Adèle were very kind people with loud voices, but she did not understand them, and did not want to understand them. All she wanted was to be with Edith again. She had written two poems in Italian, which her mother said were better than anything she had ever written before. And good-bye--and oh! let Edith get well quickly, and let them be together in England again. There was a tender postscript from Valeria telling her to be good and get well quickly.

Yes, yes; Edith felt that she would get well quickly. Her temperature was up, and the slight prickle of fever in her blood gave her a sensation of eagerness, almost of hurry, as if she were hastening through illness to health, and she felt gladly and intensely alive. She pressed little Nancy's letter to her lips, and lay back in her chair.

Hers was the last but one of a long row of couches on the southern terrace of the Belvedere. On either side of her were other reclining figures. Next to her on the right was a Russian girl, a few years older than herself, with a pinched and hectic face. On her left was Fritz Klasen, a German, twenty-four years old, ruddy and broad-shouldered. His blue eyes were open when Edith turned her face towards him.

"How do you like Davos?" he said.

Edith answered: "Very much," and the young man nodded and smiled.

The Russian girl opened her black eyes and looked at Edith. "Have you just come up?" she asked.

Edith said: "Yes; we arrived three days ago. How long have you been here?"

"Four years," said the girl, and shut her eyes again.

Edith turned her head to the young German, and exchanged with him a pitying glance.

"And you?" she asked him.

"I have been here eight months. I am quite well. I am going home in May."

The Russian opened her dark eyes again, but did not speak.

"Are you going to the dance to-night?" said the young man after a while.

"A dance? Where?" asked Edith.

"Here, in the hotel--in the big ball-room. We have a dance here every Wednesday, and the Grand Hotel has one every Saturday. Great fun." And he cleared his throat and hummed "La Valse Bleue."

Edith went into the ball-room that evening, and although she did not dance, she enjoyed herself very much. Mrs. Avory repeatedly asked her if she was tired. "No, mother--no." There was a wild feverish excitement all round her that she felt and shared without understanding it--the excitement of the _danse macabre_.

Fritz Klasen came to where she sat, and, striking his heels together, introduced himself to her and to her mother.

"I had no idea Davos was so gay," said Mrs. Avory, raising her light gentle eyes to the young man's face.

"Gayest place in the world," he said. "No time to mope."

A girl in strawberry silk came rushing to him. "Lancers," she said, and took his arm. They went off hurriedly, sliding like children on the polished floor.

"He does not look ill," said Mrs. Avory.

"Nor does she," said Edith.

"No one does." And the mother gazed at the laughing, dancing crowd, and wondered if they all had within them the gnawing horror that she knew was shut in her daughter's fragile breast.

"Have you noticed," she said, "that nobody coughs?"

"It is true," said Edith. "Nobody coughs."

After a short silence Mrs. Avory said: "Probably most of them are here for the winter sports."

For a long time she believed this. Young faces with pink cheeks and vivid eyes, and laughter, much laughter, surrounded her. There were balls and concerts, routs and bazaars, and everywhere the vivid eyes, and the pink cheeks, and the laughter. The only strange thing that Mrs. Avory noticed about her new friends was that when she said good-night to them, and shook hands with them, their hands were strange to the touch, and gave her a little shock.

They were not like the hands of other people that one clasps and thinks not of. "Good-night," to one. "What a hot hand!" she would think. "Good-night," to another. "What a cold, moist hand!" Hands of fire, and hands of ice; arid hands, that felt brittle to the touch; humid hands, which made her palms creep; weak, wet hands, from which her own recoiled. Each told their tragic tale. But the faces laughed, and the feet danced, and nobody coughed.

Edith soon stopped coughing, too. The doctor had forbidden it. She coughed in the night, when no one except her mother heard. The months swung past, promising and not fulfilling, but promising again, and Edith went to her fate submissive, with light tread.

One thing only tore at her soul--the longing to see Nancy. Nancy, Nancy, Nancy! She would say the name to herself a hundred times a day, and close her eyes to try and picture the little face, and the tuft of black curls on the top of the buoyant head. Her feverish hands felt vacant and aching for the touch of the soft, warm fingers she had held. Mrs. Avory comforted her. In the spring, or at latest in the summer, Edith should see Nancy again. Edith would be quite well in a month or two if she ate many raw eggs and was brave.

So Edith ate raw eggs and was brave.

* * * * *

Spring climbed up the five thousand feet and reached Davos at the end of May. Fritz Klasen was leaving. He was going back to Leipzig.

"Good-bye, good-bye."

He walked round the verandah at the resting-hour, shaking hands with everyone, saying, "Gute Besserung," and "Auf wiedersehen in Deutschland," to two or three Germans.

When he reached the Russian girl she was asleep. But Edith said: "Good-bye; I am so glad--I am so glad for you!"

When he had passed she saw that the Russian girl's eyes were open, and fixed on her.

"Did you speak?" said Edith.

"No," said the Russian in her strange, empty voice; "I thought."

Edith smiled. "What did you think?"

"I thought, why do you lie?"

Edith sat up, flushing, and her breath went a little shorter. "What?" she said.

Rosalia Antonowa kept her deep eyes on Edith's face.

"You said you were glad that he was going. Perhaps you meant it," she said. "You are here so short a time; but in a year, in two years, or four years, your lips will not be able to say that, and your heart will turn sick when another goes away, and you know that you will never go--never." Her bistre lids closed.

Edith tried to find something comforting to say to her.

"Davos is so beautiful, one ought not to mind. Surely you must love all this blue and white loveliness--the mountains, and the snow, and the sun."

"Oh, the mountains!" murmured Rosalia, with clenched teeth. "The mountains, weighing on my breast, and the snow freezing and choking me, and the sun blazing and blinding me. Oh!"--she raised her thin fist to the towering immensity round her--"oh, this unspeakable, this monstrous prison of death!"

Just then a Belgian girl passed, with pale lips and a tiny waist. She stopped to ask Antonowa how she was.

"Ill," said the Russian curtly.

When the girl had passed she spoke again to Edith. "And you will know what they mean when they ask you how you are. It is not the '_comment ça va_?' of the rest of the world. No; here they mean it. They want to know. 'How are you? Are you better? Are you getting better more quickly than I am? Surely you are worse than I am! What! no hæmorrhage for a month? No temperature? That is good.' And then you see the hatred looking out of their eyes."

"Oh, I don't think so," said Edith.

The Russian kept silent for a while; then she said: "Klasen will come back again. He is not cured. The doctor told him not to go. He will soon come back again."

He came back four months later. Edith was pained to see how grey and dull his face looked. Now he would have to stay two or three years more. But he said he did not mind; he was happy.

He had been married a month, and his wife was with him. He introduced his girl-wife to Edith and to Mrs. Avory on the day following his arrival. She was a gentle blonde of nineteen, a blue-blooded flower of German aristocracy, who had married Klasen against her parents' will.

"I shall cure him," she said.

The summer was magnificent. She went out a great deal for long walks and steep climbs, and she sang at all parties and concerts, for she had a lovely young voice, all trills and runs like a lark's. She would sit on the verandah at resting-time beside her husband, and near Edith, for he had his old place again, and then after a while she would kiss his forehead and run off to pay calls, or to practise, or to drive down to Klosters.

Klasen's bright blue eyes would follow her. The Russian from her couch looked at him and read his thoughts. She read: "I married that I might not be alone--alone with my ill and my terror in the night and in the day--but I am still alone. When my wife is with me, and I cough, she says: 'Poor darling!' When in the night I choke and perspire, she turns in her sleep, and says: 'Poor darling!' and goes to sleep again. And I am alone with my ill and my terror."

The Russian girl thought that Klasen's blue eyes burned with something that was not all love.

After a time the girl-wife practised less, and paid fewer calls. She said she had lost weight, and one day with her husband she went to see the doctor.

Yes, there was something--oh, very slight, very slight!--at the apex of the left lung. So a couch was brought out for her on the terrace near her husband, and she rested in the afternoons with a rug tucked round her and a parasol over her head.

Fritz held the little hand with the new wedding-ring still bright upon it. When she coughed he said: "Poor darling!" And he was no more alone. In the day-time they laughed, and were very cheerful; in the night Fritz slept better; but his wife lay awake, and thought of her sister and her two little brothers safely at home with her father and mother in Berlin.

Sometimes holiday-makers and sport-lovers came up to Davos for a fortnight or a month, especially in the winter. Mrs. Avory noticed that they laughed much less than the invalids did. When they hurried through the lounge with their skates and skis, Klasen would say:

"See how they overdo things. They wear themselves out skiing, skating, curling, bobsleighing. Yes," he would add, nodding to his wife and to Edith, "almost everyone who comes here as a sportsman returns here as an invalid."

His little laugh made Edith shiver. Sometimes the girl-wife would bend forward. "See, Fritz; two more have arrived to-day!"

"Do you think they are tourists?"

"Oh no, no; they are ill." And in the young eyes that gazed upon the new-comers was no sorrow.

* * * * *

The months and the years swung round, and Edith passed along them with light and ever lighter tread. And still and always the longing for Nancy tore at her heart with poisoned teeth. Every hour of her day was bitter with longing for the sound of the childish voice, the touch of the soft, warm hand. She sometimes thought: "If I were dying, Valeria would let Nancy come here to say good-bye." Then again she thought:

"If Nancy came I should recover. I cannot eat enough now to get strong because I am so often near to crying; but if Nancy were here I should not cry. I should eat much more; I should not feel so sad; I should go out for walks with her. I know I should recover...."

But Nancy was in Italy in the house of Aunt Carlotta and Cousin Adèle, and Edith's letters were not given to her, lest the paper over which Edith had bent should carry poison in its love-laden pages.

Nancy now spoke Italian and wrote Italian poems. She went out for walks with Adèle, and Adèle held the soft, warm hand and heard the sweet treble voice. Adèle kept the house quiet and the meals waiting when Nancy was writing; and when Nancy frowned and passed her hand across her forehead with the little quick gesture she often used, Adèle laughed her loud Milanese laugh that drove all the butterfly-thoughts away. Adèle tidied Nancy's things and threw away the dried primroses Edith had picked with her in the Hertfordshire woods, and gave the string of blue beads Edith had put round Nancy's neck the day she left for Davos to the hall-porter's child, and she tore up all the poems Nancy had written in England, because they were old things that nobody could understand.

Thus, as the months and the years swung round, Edith went from Nancy's memory. Softly, slowly, with light tread, the girl-figure passed from her recollection and was gone; for children and poets are forgetful and selfish, and a child who is a poet is doubly selfish, and doubly forgetful.

* * * * *

When Nancy was fifteen, Zardo, the Milan publisher, accepted her first book--"A Cycle of Lyrics." By the post that brought the first proofs to the little poet came also a letter, black-edged, from Switzerland, for her mother.

"Mother, mother!" cried Nancy, drawing the printed pages from the large envelope, and shaking them out before her, "Look, the proofs, the proofs! This is my book, my own book!"

And she lifted all the rough sheets to her face and kissed them.

But Valeria had opened the black-edged letter, and was gazing at it, pale, with tears in her eyes.

"Nancy," she said, "Edith is dead."

"Oh, mother dear!" exclaimed Nancy, "I am so sorry!" And she bent over her mother and kissed her. Then she went back to her proofs and turned over the first page.

"She died on Thursday morning," sobbed Valeria. "And oh, Nancy, she loved you so!"

But Nancy had not heard. Before her lay her first printed poem. The narrow verses on the wide white sheet looked to her like a slender pathway.

And along this pathway went Nancy with starry matutinal eyes, beyond the reach of love and the call of Death, leading her dreams far out past the brief arch of Fame, into the shining plains of Immortality.

XII

So Valeria had her wish. Her child was a genius, and a genius recognized and glorified as only Latin countries glorify and recognize their own. Nancy stepped from the twilight of the nursery into the blinding uproar of celebrity, and her young feet walked dizzily on the heights. She was interviewed and quoted, imitated and translated, envied and adored. She had as many enemies as a Cabinet Minister, and as many inamorati as a _première danseuse_.

To the Signora Carlotta's tidy apartment in Corso Venezia came all the poets of Italy. They sat round Nancy and read their verses to her, and the criticisms of their verses, and their answers to the criticisms. There were tempestuous poets with pointed beards, and successful poets with turned-up moustaches; there were lonely, unprinted poets, and careless, unwashed poets; there was also a poet who stole an umbrella and an overcoat from the hall. Aunt Carlotta said it was the Futurist, but Adèle felt sure it was the Singer of the Verb of Magnificent Sterility, the one with the red and evil eyes.

Soon came a letter from Rome bearing the arms of the royal house. Her Majesty the Queen desired to hear Giovanna Desiderata read her poems at the Quirinal at half-past four o'clock of next Friday afternoon.

The house was in a flutter. Everywhere and at all hours, in the intervals of packing trunks, Aunt Carlotta, Adèle, Valeria, and Nancy practised deep curtseying and kissing of hand, and wondered if they had to say "Your Majesty" every time they spoke, or only casually once or twice. They started for Rome at once. A gorgeous dress and plumed hat was bought for Nancy, a white veil was tied for the first time over her childish face, and in very tight white gloves, holding the small volume of her poems, she went with trembling heart--accompanied by Valeria, Carlotta, and Adèle in large feather boas--to the Quirinal.

A gentle-voiced, simply-gowned lady-in-waiting received them, and smiled a little as she explained that only Nancy was expected and could be received. Nancy was then told to remove her veil and her right-hand glove. Carlotta, Valeria, and Adèle embraced her as if she were leaving them for a week, and made the sign of the cross on her forehead; then the lady-in-waiting conducted her through a succession of yellow rooms, of blue rooms, of red rooms, into the white and gold room where the Queen awaited her.

More gentle-voiced and more simply gowned than her lady-in-waiting, the Queen, standing beside a table laden with flowers, moved to meet the little figure in the huge plumed hat. Nancy forgot the practised curtsey and the rehearsed salute. She clasped and held the gracious hand extended to her, and suddenly, as the awed, childish eyes filled with tears, the Queen bent forward and kissed her....

It was late and almost dark when Nancy returned, dream-like, with pale lips, to her mother, her aunt, and her cousin, who were having a nervous meal of sandwiches and wines with a gentleman in uniform standing beside them, and two powdered footmen waiting on them. They all three hurriedly put on their boas as soon as Nancy appeared, and they left, escorted and bowed out by the gentleman in uniform. "Probably the Duke of Aosta," said Aunt Carlotta vaguely. Another powdered footman conducted them to the royal automobile in which they returned to the hotel.

Nancy was disappointing in her description of everything. She sat in the dusky carriage with her eyes shut, holding her mother's hand. She could not tell Aunt Carlotta what she had eaten. Tea? Yes, tea. And cakes? Yes, cakes. But what kind of cakes, and what else? She did not remember. And she could not tell Adèle how the Queen was dressed. In white? No, not in white. Was it silk? She did not know. What rings did the Queen wear, and what brooch? Nancy could not remember. And had she said "Your Majesty" to her, or "Signora"? Nancy did not know. Neither, she thought. Then her mother asked timidly: "Did she like your poems?" And Nancy tightened the clasp on her mother's hand and said, "Yes."

Carlotta and Adèle were convinced that Nancy had made a fiasco of the visit and of the reading. She had blundered over the greeting, and had forgotten to say "Maestà." But they talked to everybody in the hotel about their afternoon at the Quirinal, and pretended not to be surprised when the hall-porter brought to them at the luncheon-table a packet containing three pictures of the Queen with her signature, one for each; and for Nancy a jewel-case, with crown and monogram, containing a brooch of blue enamel with the royal initial in diamonds.

Nancy bought a diary, and wrote on the first page the date and a name--the name of a flower, the name of the Queen.

* * * * *

They returned to Milan in a dream. A crowd of friends awaited them at the station, foremost among them Zio Giacomo, shorter of breath and quicker of temper than ever, and beside him the returned prodigal, Nino, who had never been seen and seldom been heard of for the past eight years. Adèle turned crimson, and Valeria turned white as the well-remembered dark eyes smiled at them from the handsome, sunburnt face; and Nino turned up his moustache and helped them to alight from the train, and kissed them all loudly on both cheeks. Nancy did not remember him at all. She looked at him gravely while he rapidly described to her a pink pinafore she used to wear in England eight years ago, and a Punch-and-Judy show, stage-managed by a Fräulein Something or other, and a dimple just like her mother's that she then possessed. Immediately the dimple reappeared, dipping sweetly in the young curved cheek, and Valeria smiled with tears in her eyes and kissed Nancy. Then Nino kissed Valeria and kissed Nancy, and then he kissed Adèle, too, who was acidly looking on. At last Zio Giacomo, growing very impatient, hurried them off the crowded platform and into cabs and carriages. They drove home, Nino crushing in at the last moment with Valeria, Carlotta, and Nancy. He did not ask about the Queen, nor did he tell them anything about his own long absence; but he quoted Baudelaire and Mallarmé to them all the way home in a low resonant voice broken by the jolts of the carriage. He did not quote Nancy's poems. "They are sacrosanct," he said. "My lips are unworthy." Then he drifted into Richepin:

"Voici mon sang et ma chair, Bois et mange!"

he said, looking straight before him at Valeria. And Valeria turned pale again, uselessly, hopelessly; for the eyes that looked at her did not see her.

Zio Giacomo and Nino stayed with them to dinner, and two of the poets, a successful one and an unwashed one, came later in the evening.

"What do you think of D'Annunzio?" asked Nino of Nancy, when the poets had stopped a moment to take breath.

"I have not read him. I have read nobody and nothing," said Nancy.

"That is right," cried Marvasi, the unwashed, nodding his rusty head and clapping his dusty fingers. "Read nothing, and retain your originality."

"Read everything," cried Cesare Raffaelli, "and cultivate form."

During the discussion that followed, the din of the two poets' voices built a wall of solitude round Nino and Nancy.

"How old are you?" asked Nino, looking at her mild forehead, where the dark eyebrows lay over her light grey eyes like quiet wings.

"Sixteen," said Nancy; and the dimple dipped.

Nino did not return her smile. "Sixteen!" he said. And because his eyes were used to the line of a fading cheek and the bitterness of a tired mouth, his heart fell, love-struck and conquered, before Nancy's cool and innocent youth. It was inevitable.

"Sixteen!" he repeated, looking at her, grave and wondering. "Is anybody in the world sixteen?"

And it was not the inspired author of the poems over which half Italy raved, but the little girl with the wing-like eyebrows, that his wonder went to; and it was the chilly little hand of the maiden, not the pulse of the poet, that shook his heart loose from those other white, well-remembered hands, where the blue veins, soft and slightly turgid, marked the slower course of the blood--those sad blue veins which moved his pity and strangled his desire.

"May I call you by your right name?" he asked. "'Nancy' seems so--geographical."

Nancy laughed. "Call me as you will."

"_Desiderata_" he said slowly, and the colour left his face as he pronounced it.

That evening Nancy wrote on the second page of her diary the date, and a name; then she scratched the name out again, and the Queen remained in the book alone.

Every morning since the visit to the Quirinal Nancy's chocolate and her letters were brought in to her at eight o'clock by Adèle herself, who regarded it now as an office of honour to wait on the little Sappho of Italy. She came in, in dressing-gown and slippers, with her long black hair in a plait, and placed the dainty tray by Nancy's bed; then she opened the shutters and came back to sit beside Nancy, and open her correspondence for her. Nancy the while, like a lazy princess, sipped her chocolate, with her little finger in the air. Newspaper cuttings about Nancy were read first; requests for autographs were carefully put aside for Adèle to answer. Adèle said that she could write Nancy's autograph more like Nancy than Nancy herself. Then poems and love-letters were read and commented upon with peals of laughter--and business letters were put aside and not read at all.

So many people came and spoke to Nancy of what she had written that she had no time to write anything new. But her brain was stimulated by all the modernists and symbolists and futurists who recited their works to her; and in the long lamp-lit evenings, while Aunt Carlotta was playing briscola with Zio Giacomo, Nino read Carducci's "Odi Barbare" to the three listening women--Valeria, Adèle, and Nancy--who sat in their large armchairs with drooping lids and folded hands, like a triptichi of the seasons of love.

Valeria always sat a little apart in the shadow, and if anyone spoke to her she replied softly and smiled wanly. Valeria's dimple had slipped into a little line on her cheek. Valeria herself was not Valeria any more. She was Nancy's mother. She had moved back into the shadow, where mothers sit with kind eyes that no one gazes into, and sweet mouths that no one kisses, and white hands that bless and renunciate. The baby had pushed her there. Gently, inexorably, with the first outstretching of the tiny fist, with the first soft pressure of the pink fragile fingers against the maternal breast, the child had pushed the mother from her place in the sunlight--gently, inexorably, out of love, out of joy, out of life--into the shadow where mothers sit with eyes whose tears no one kisses away, with heart-beats that no one counts. Nancy sooner than others had taken her own high place in the sun; for if most children are like robin redbreasts, slayers of their old, Genius, the devourer, is like an eagle that springs full-fledged, with careless, devastating wings, from the nest of a dove.

* * * * *

"Nancy," cried Adèle, bursting into her cousin's room one afternoon, "here is an Englishman to see you. Come quickly. I cannot understand a word he says."

"Oh, send mother to him," said Nancy. "I have forgotten all my English. Besides, I must read this noxious Gabriele to the end."

"Your mother has gone out. Do come!" And Adèle gave Nancy's hair a little pull on each side and a pat on the top, and hurried her to the drawing-room, where the Englishman was waiting. He rose, a stern-looking, clean-shaven man, with friendly eyes in a hard face.

Nancy put out her hand and said: "Buon giorno."

He answered: "How do you do? My Italian is very poor. May I speak English?"

Nancy dimpled. "You may speak it, but I may not understand it," she said.

But she understood him. He had written a critical essay on her book, with prose translations of some of the lyrics, and wished to close the article with an _aperçu_ of her literary aims and intentions. What work was she doing at present! What message----?

"Nothing," said Nancy, with a little helpless Latin gesture of her hands. "I am doing nothing."

"_Peccato!_" said the Englishman. And he added: "I mean your Italian word in both senses--a pity and a sin."

Nancy nodded, and looked wistful.

"Why are you not working?" asked her visitor severely.

Nancy repeated the little helpless gesture. "I don't know," she said; then she smiled. "In Italy we talk so much. We say all the beautiful things we might write. That is why Italian literature is so poor, and Italian cafés so interesting. As for our thoughts, when we have said them they are gone--blown away like the fluff of the dandelions I used to tell the time by when I was a little girl in England."

That childish reminiscence brought her very near to him, and he told her about his mother and his younger sister, who lived in Kent, in an old-fashioned house in the midst of a great garden.

"You make me homesick for England," said Nancy.

Mr. Kingsley looked pleased. "Do you remember England?" he asked.

"No," said Nancy; "I am always homesick for things that I have forgotten, or for things that I never have known." And she smiled, but in her eyes wavered the nostalgic loneliness of the dreamer's soul.

The Englishman cleared his throat, and said in a practical voice: "I hope that you will work very hard, and do great things."

* * * * *

She tried to. She got up early the next morning, and wrote in her diary, "_Incipit vita nova!_" and she made an elaborate time-table for every hour of the day; then she made a list of the things she intended to write--subjects and ideas that had stirred in her mind for months past, but had been scattered by distracting visits, dispersed in futile conversations. She felt impatient and happy and eager. On the large white sheet of paper which lay before her, like a wonderful unexplored country full of resplendent possibilities, she traced with reverent forefinger the sign of the cross.

Some one knocked at the door. It was Clarissa della Rocca, Nino's married sister, tall, trim, and sleek in magnificent clothes.

"_Mes amours!_" she exclaimed, embracing Nancy, and pressing her long chin quickly against Nancy's cheek. "Do put on your hat and come for a drive with me. Aldo has come from America. He is downstairs in the stanhope. He is trying my husband's new sorrels, and so, of course, I insisted on going with him. Now I am frightened, and I have nobody to scream to and to catch hold of."

"Catch hold of Aldo, whoever he may be," said Nancy, laughing.

"He is my brother-in-law. But I can't," said Clarissa, waving explanatory mauve-gloved hands; "he is driving. Besides, he is horribly cross. Have you never seen him? He is Carlo's youngest brother. Do come. He will be much nicer if you are there."

"But he does not know me," said Nancy, still with her pen in her hand.

"That's why. He is always nice to people he does not know. Come quickly, _ma chérie_. He is _ravissant_. He has been to America on a wild and lonely ranch in Texas. He speaks English and German, and he sings like an angel. Make yourself beautiful, _mon chou aimé_."

Nancy slipped into a long coat, and pinned a large hat on her head without looking in the glass.

Clarissa watched her from out of her long careful eyelids, and said: "Mon Dieu!" Then she asked suddenly: "How young are you?"

"Nearly seventeen," said Nancy, looking for her gloves.

"What luck!" sighed Clarissa. "And you are sure you won't mind if I pinch you? I must! The near horse rears."

Then they ran downstairs together, where Aldo della Rocca sat, holding the two impatient sorrels in with shortened reins. He was flicking at their ears and making them plunge with curved, angry necks and frothing mouths. He was certainly _ravissant_. His profile, as Nancy saw it against the blue June sky, was like Praxiteles' Hermes. His glossy hair gleamed blue-black as he raised his hat with a sweeping gesture that made Nancy smile. Then they were seated behind him, and the puissant horses shot off down the Corso and towards the Bastioni at a magnificent pace. Clarissa shrieked a little now and then when she remembered to, but Aldo did not seem to hear her, so she soon desisted.

"Is he not seraphically beautiful?" she said to Nancy, pointing an ecstatic forefinger at her brother-in-law's slim back. "I often say to Carlo: 'Why, why did I meet you first, and not your Apolline brother?'"

Nancy smiled. "But surely he is rather young."

"He is twenty-four, you little stinging-nettle," said Clarissa; "and he has been so much petted and adored by all the women of Naples that he might be a thousand."

"How horrid!" said Nancy, looking disdainfully at the unwitting back before her, at the shining black hair above the high white collar, and at the irreproachable hat sitting correctly on the top of it all.

"Oh yes, he is horrid," said Clarissa; "but how visually delectable!"

Aldo della Rocca turned his profile towards them. "I shall take you along the Monza road," he said.

"Oh," cried Clarissa, "such an ugly old road, where no one will see us."

"I am driving the horses out to-day," said her brother-in-law, "not your Paris frocks." And he turned away again, and took the road towards Monza at a spanking gait.

"Il est si spirituel!" laughed Clarissa, who bubbled over into French at the slightest provocation. The straight, white, dusty road, bordered with poplars, stretched its narrowing line before them, and the sorrels went like the wind. Suddenly, as they were nearing the first ugly-looking houses of Sesto, the driver checked suddenly, and the ladies bent forward to see why. A hundred paces before them, struggling and swaying, now on the side-walk, now almost in the middle of the road, were two women and a man. Some children standing near a door shrieked, but the struggling, scuffling group uttered no sound. Nancy stood up. The man, whose hat had fallen in the road--one could see his dishevelled hair and red face--had wrenched one arm loose from the clutch of the women, and with a quick gesture drew from his pocket something that the sun glanced on.

"He has a knife or a pistol!" gasped Nancy.

The struggling women had seen it, too, and now they shrieked, clutching and grappling with him, and screaming for help.

Nancy thrust her small, strong hands forward. "I can hold the horses," she said, and seized the reins from Della Rocca's fingers.

He turned and looked at her in surprise. "Why, what----?" And he stopped.

She read the doubt in his face, and read it wrong.

"I can--I can!" she cried. "Go quickly! We shall be all right!"

He twisted his mouth in curious fashion; then he jumped from his seat, and ran in light leaps across the road. The man was holding the revolver high out of the women's reach, while they clung to him and held him frantically, convulsively, crying: "Help! Madonna! Help!"

Della Rocca reached him in an instant, and wrenched the short revolver away. With a quick gesture he opened the barrel and shook the cartridges out upon the ground. He tossed the weapon to one of a dozen men who had now come hurrying out of a neighbouring wine-shop, and, running lightly across the dusty road, he was back at the side of the carriage in an instant. He glanced up at Nancy, and raised his hat again with the exaggerated sweep that had caused her to smile before.

"Pardon me for keeping you waiting," he said.

"Ah, _quel poseur!_" cried Clarissa, who had sat with her eyes shut, holding her ears during the excitement.

Della Rocca smiled, and, jumping into his place, took the reins from Nancy's strained and trembling hands. She dropped back in her seat feeling faint and excited. The horses plunged and started forward again.

"What courage!" said Clarissa, taking Nancy's fingers in her own.

"Yes," said Nancy, looking with approval at the straight, slim shoulders and the black hair and the irreproachable hat. "I like a brave man."

Clarissa gave one of her little Parisian shrieks.

"_Ouiche!_ it is not Aldo--it is you who are brave! Aldo is as cautious as a hare, but, being a preposterous _poseur_, he would not miss an effect for worlds!" And Clarissa flourished an imaginary hat in the Della Rocca style.

Nancy laughed, and believed not a word about the hare.

When they left her at her door she answered his sweeping salutation with a serious little nod; she ran up the stairs hurriedly, and into her room. On her writing-table lay an unopened letter from Nino; he wrote to her every morning and called on her every afternoon.

Nancy did not glance at it. She ran out on to the balcony. But the stanhope had already turned out of sight.

Nancy stepped back into her room and slowly drew off her gloves. For some unexplained reason she was glad that her wrists still ached, and that her fingers were bruised by the dragging of the hard, stiff reins.

From the open balcony the wind blew into the room, and scattered the papers on her writing-table. It blew away Nino's letter; it blew away the elaborate time-table she had drawn up and the lists of the work she was to do; it blew away the large white sheet of paper--the fair sheet full of resplendent possibilities--on which she had traced with reverent finger the sign of the cross.

XIII

When the Englishman called again to bring her a copy of the _Fortnightly_ with the article on "An Italian Lyrist," he found that she had not worked at all; she looked as sweet and helpless and idle as ever, and the room was full of visitors. He was introduced to her mother, whom he found gentle and subdued, and to the vigorous, loud-voiced Aunt Carlotta, and to all the poets.

"I am afraid, mother dear," said Nancy, leaning her billowy head against her mother's arm and looking up at her new friend with May-morning eyes, "that Mr. Kingsley will think I have no character."

"You have a complexion," interposed Aunt Carlotta. "That is enough for a girl."

Valeria laughed. "It is true. Italian girls must not have characters until they marry. Then their husbands make it for them, according to their own tastes."

Mr. Kingsley smiled down at Nancy. "Why should I think you have no character?"

"Because you told me to work. And I promised; and I have not," said Nancy.

"Have you done nothing at all since I saw you?" he asked.

Nancy shook her head.

"And have you no thoughts, no ideas that urge for expression?"

"Oh yes!" said Nancy, waving eloquent, impatient fingers. "Ideas and thoughts grow and bloom and blow in my mind like flowers in a garden. Then all these people come and talk to me.... Alas," she sighed, looking round the murmuring, laughing room, "in the evening my garden is barren, for I have cut all my flowers and given them away."

The Englishman forgot that he was English, and said what he thought:

"I wish I could carry you off, and lock you up for a year, with nothing but books and a table and an inkstand," he said.

"I wish you could," laughed Nancy, clasping eager hands. "I should love it. Not a soul would be allowed to speak to me. And I should have my meals passed in through the window."

The Englishman laughed the sudden laugh of one who laughs seldom. "And I should walk up and down outside with a gun."

Nancy looked at him, and a quick, shy thought, like a bird darting into an open window, entered her mind for an instant. Surely it would be good to have this strong, kind sentinel between herself and the world; to feel the light firmness of his touch on her shoulder keeping her to her work--to the work she loved, and yet was willing to neglect at the call of every passing voice. This stern, fair countenance would face the world for her; these strong shoulders would carry her burdens; these candid eyes would look into her soul and keep it clear and bright.

Then the bird-thought flew out of the window of her mind, for the door opened and love and destiny came in. It was Aldo della Rocca, more than ever visually delectable.

With him came his sister-in-law Clarissa, and Nino. Nino looked depressed and dreary; La Villari was writing to him; his conscience was harassing him; Aldo della Rocca's self-confident beauty irritated him.

"What, Nino! Here again?" said Nancy, with a laugh. "You said last night that henceforward you would never come to see us more than twice a week."

"That's right," said Nino. "Yesterday was the last visit of last week, and this is the first visit of this week. Besides, Della Rocca told me he was coming, so I felt that I had to come too. Of course, I did all I could to shake him off, but he is as persistent and adhesive as one of his compatriot cab-drivers in Santa Lucia. So that is why I could not come alone."

"How confusing!" said Nancy, turning to greet Della Rocca.

Della Rocca smiled; and his smile was sudden and brilliant, as if a row of lights had been lit at the back of his eyes.

He bent over Nancy's proffered hand. "Signora--your slave!" he said in ceremonious Southern fashion.

Clarissa's high voice rang out. "He has been reading your poems day and night, Nancy. And he has put them to music. Glorious! Quite à la Richard Strauss or Tosti or Hugo Wolff! He must sing them to you."

Then she sailed round, greeting the poets, many of whom she knew. The Englishman was introduced as the Signor Kingsley, and Clarissa asked him many questions about London, and did not wait to hear what he answered, but went off with Adèle and Aunt Carlotta to a French lecture on "Napoléon et les Femmes." The poets, as soon as they had had vermouth and biscottini di Novara, also went away.

Then Della Rocca seated himself at the piano, and, preluding softly, strayed from harmony to harmony into the songs he had composed for Nancy. He played with his head bent forward and his soft hair falling darkly over half his face, making him look like a younger brother of Velasquez's Christ. He had the musical talent of a Neapolitan street-boy and the voice of an angel who had studied singing in Germany. Nancy felt happy tears welling into her eyes, and Della Rocca's clear-cut, down-curving profile wavered before her gaze.

The Signor Kingsley sat silent in his corner near the window. Valeria was in the shadow with some quiet work in her hand, and Nino, who was sulky and bored, smoked cigarette after cigarette and yawned.

Nancy bent forward with clasped hands, listening to her own words, the lovelier for their garb of music as children are more lovely when clothed in shimmering robes and crowned with roses. She had sent her thoughts out into the world, in their innocent and passionate immaturity, bare and wild. And, behold, he brought them back to her veiled in silver minor keys, borne on palanquins of rhythmic harmonies, regal, measured, stately, like the young sisters of a queen.

Mr. Kingsley's mouth tightened as he watched the back of the singer's black head nodding to the music, and listened to the soft tenor voice rolling over the "r's" and broadening on the mellow "a's" of the tender Italian words. He felt his own good English baritone contracting in his throat, and he wondered what made "these Latin idiots" sing as they did. Then he glanced at Nancy, who had closed her eyes, and at Nino, who was in the rocking-chair staring at the ceiling; and suddenly he felt that he must take his leave. He rose at the end of the cycle of songs, and Nancy turned to him with vague eyes to say good-bye. His kind clear gaze rested on her face.

"Do not cut all your flowers," he said.

Nancy shook her head. "No, no!" she said. "I won't. I really won't."

"Remember that your masterpiece is before you, and the little poems are done with. Lock your doors. Shut out the world, and start on a new work to-morrow."

Nancy said, "Yes, yes, I will." Then an absent look stole over her light eyes. "Ah! _der Musikant!_" she cried, turning to Della Rocca, who was singing in German, and pronouncing as if it were Genovese. "I remember that. Is it not Eichendorff?"

"'Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts,'" said Della Rocca.

"Oh, do you really speak German? I love people who speak German," cried Nancy, on whom the German poet's spell still rested.

"I learned it at Göttingen," said Della Rocca, with his illuminating smile.

"Ach, de Stadt die am schönsten ist wenn man sie mit dem Rücken ansieht," quoted Nancy, laughing.

Della Rocca laughed too, although he did not understand what she had said; then he turned to the piano again.

Nancy felt happy and inclined to kindness. "Do not go yet," she said to Mr. Kingsley. "Sit down and talk to me."

But Mr. Kingsley knew better. Della Rocca's melting notes were drawing the girl's thoughts away again, and he could notice the little shiver creep round her face, leaving it slightly paler, as the silver tenor voice took a high A in falsetto and held it long and pianissimo.

"I will come again some day, if I may," he said. "But I almost hope that I shall find your doors locked."

Again the bird-thought came fluttering into the window of Nancy's mind, as the Englishman's strong hand closed firm and warm round hers.

Then the door was shut on Mr. Paul Kingsley, and the thought flew away and was gone.

"Who is that conceited fool of an Englishman?" said Nino, who felt cross and liked to show it.

Nancy flushed. "Please don't speak like that about Englishmen. My father was English." Then she added, with a little toss of her head: "And he was not a bit of a conceited fool."

"I never said he was," said Nino.

"Oh!" gasped Nancy, "you did!"

"I said nothing of the kind," declared Nino. "Your father was a good and noble man."

"You know I was not talking of my father," said Nancy.

"No more was I," said Nino.

Nancy turned to Della Rocca, who was preluding carelessly with smooth fingers and all his smiles alight.

"Nino always cavils and confuses until one does not know what one is talking about!"

Della Rocca nodded. "That is just what his celebrated friend, Nunziata Villari, said about him when I saw her in Naples. By the way, Nino,"--he ran up a quick scale of fourths and let them fall in a minor arpeggio like tumbling water--"they say La Villari tried to commit suicide last month. Locked herself up with a brazier of coke, like a love-sick grisette. Did you hear about it?"

"No," said Nino, "I did not." Then he looked long, mildly, fixedly at Della Rocca, who after a moment got up and said good-bye.

When he had left, Nancy said to Nino: "Who is La Villari? And why did she try to kill herself? La Villari! I thought that was an actress who had died a hundred years ago."

Nino took her hand. "You don't know anything, Nancy," he said. "You don't even know that you are a vulture and a shark."

Nancy laughed. "Yes, but who is La Villari?"

"She is someone you have devoured," said Nino.

And, remembering the brazier of coke, he left for Naples by the next train; for, though he had a nose of putty, he had a heart of gold.

XIV

During the long, dreary journey in an empty carriage of the slow train Nino fought his battles and chastened his soul. He set his conscience on the empty seat before him and looked it in the face. The desires of his heart sat near him, and took his part. His conscience had a dirty face that irritated him; his desires were fair as lilies and had high treble voices that spoke loud. His conscience said nothing, only sat there showing its dirty face and irritating him.

By the time Bologna was reached the lilies had it all their own way. After all he was young--well, comparatively young; thirty-one is young for a man--and he had his life before him, while Nunziata--well, she had lived her life. And she had had eight years of his: the eight best years, for after all at thirty-one a man is not young--well, not so young. His conscience was staring at him, so he changed argument. Nunziata did not really love him any more, she had told him so a hundred times during the last two years; it was a burden, a chain of misery to them both. She had herself begged him to leave her after one of those well-remembered, never-ending scenes that were always occurring since she had finally abandoned the theatre for his sake.

She had said: "Go! I implore you to go! I cannot live like this any longer! For my sake, go!" So it was really in order to please her that he had gone.

The face of his conscience opposite him was looking dirtier than ever. But the treble voices of his desires rang shrill: "He must not forget his duties to himself and to others. He had a duty to his father, who longed to have him near him, settled happily and normally; he had a duty to Valeria, who----" Here he quickly changed argument again. "He had a duty to Nancy, to little, innocent, wonderful Nancy, who understood nothing of the world; she must be saved from designing knaves, from struggling _littérateurs_ and poets who would like to marry her and use her vogue in order to scramble up to a reputation, from the professional _beau jeune homme_ like Aldo, who would break her heart.... It really was his duty----" The train slowed, shivered, and stopped. He was glad to get out, and rush to a hurried supper in the buffet, because the ugly face opposite him was more than he could stand.

All through the night in the slow train to Rome he fought his battles and chastened his soul, and the little ugly face said not a word, but looked at him.

When day dawned he had broken the lilies, and they lay, whiter than before, at his feet. And the face of his conscience was clean. When Rome was reached, where he had three hours to wait for the Naples express, he hurried into the telegraph-office and sent a message to Nunziata:

"Arriving this evening at nine. Forgive. Yours for ever, NINO."

Then, just as he was getting into the hotel omnibus, he learned that a special excursion train was leaving for Naples at once. He could arrive four hours sooner. He hastened back into the station, caught the train, and was already approaching Naples when La Villari received his telegram.

La Villari had just begun her luncheon, and the _spaghetti al burro e formaggio_ lay in a goodly heap of pale gold on her plate. She had just put her fork into them and begun to turn it round and round, when Teresa came in excitedly.

"A telegram, Illustrissima," she said.

La Villari opened the telegram. "Misericordia!" she said. "He is coming back."

Teresa cleaned her hands on her apron. What? The Signorino? He was returning?

"Yes, to-night. At nine o'clock," sighed La Villari.

Well, let the Illustrissima not allow the spaghetti to get cold. And Teresa sighed also, as she left the room and hustled the telegraph-boy off without giving him a tip.

They had been so happy without the Signorino. They had had such quiet, comfortable meals. The Illustrissima had had no nerves, no convulsions, but a good appetite and a pleasant temper. Now it would all begin again: the excitements, the tempers of the Illustrissima; the dinner left to get cold while the Illustrissima and the Signorino quarrelled; the rushings out of the Signorino; the tears of the Illustrissima; the telephone messages; the visitors and relations to argue with and console the Illustrissima; then the returnings of the Signorino; and supper for everybody in the middle of the night. It was not a life.

Teresa brought in the auburn cutlet a la Milanese. There! already it was beginning. The Illustrissima had not eaten the spaghetti!

"Do not bother me with the spaghetti," said the Illustrissima, who already had the nerves. "Let us think about this evening."

"Yes," said Teresa. "Shall we have vol-au-vent that His Excellency likes?"

"Oh, do not bother me with vol-au-vent!" cried the Illustrissima. "Do you not understand that he must not find us like this?"

"Vossignoria will put on the blue crêpe-de-chine gown," said Teresa; "and I will order the coiffeuse for six o'clock."

Yes, yes; but that was not sufficient. Nino must not find her sitting there waiting for him, as if she had no one in the world but him.

"Go away, Teresa, go away! I must think," she said. And Teresa went to her kitchen grumbling.

La Villari's views of life and her manner of dealing with situations were according to Sardou, Dumas, or D'Annunzio. Nino must either find her supine in a darkened room, with etiolated cheeks and blue shadows under her spent eyes; or then, after his arrival, she must enter, coming from some brilliant banquet, rose-crowned and laughing. She sees him! She vacillates. Her jewelled hand clutches at her heart. "_Nino!_"--and he is at her feet.... Then he makes her a scene of jealousy. Where has she been? With whom? Where was she when his telegram arrived? Who sends her all these flowers? Pah! He throws them out of the window--and all is as it should be.

As it happened, there were no flowers in the room. So La Villari rang the bell and told Teresa to order fifty francs worth of white roses and tuberoses from the florist, to be brought as soon as possible, and the hair-dresser for six o'clock, and the brougham for seven.

"And, Teresa!..."

Teresa turned back with a dreary face.

"Remember that it was you who opened the telegram. I was out. I am always out. With many people, you understand."

Yes, Teresa understood. And with callous back and shuffling shoes she went away to order the flowers, and the brougham, and the hair-dresser.

La Villari unpinned her hair, put the greater part of it neatly on the dressing-table in readiness for the coiffeuse, rubbed a little lanoline round her eyes, and settled herself with Matilde Serao's "Indomani" to one more peaceful afternoon.

Love was not peaceful, it was agitating and uncomfortable; and keeping up the pretence of being twenty-eight when one is forty-five is a labour and a toil. Of course, she adored Nino; the mere thought of his ever tiring of her, or leaving her, brought visions of despair and vengeance, of vitriol and dagger to her mind. But oh! how she envied those placid women who surrender their youth submissively, and slip serenely into gentle middle-age as a ship glides into quiet waters. With her, because her lover was young, she must grasp and grapple with the engulfing years. She must clutch at her youth as a child clutches a wild bird fluttering to escape. Alas! when the child opens its fingers the prisoner is dead. Better let it fly when it will.

So thought Nunziata Villari. The feathers and the wings still lay in her hand, but youth, the bird, was dead.

She took up the book, and stifled thought under the blanket of Matilde Serao's warm prose.

The excursion train ran into Naples at five o'clock, just as a florist in the Strada Caracciolo was threading a wire into the green throat of the last white rose for the Illustrissima. Fifty francs worth of roses in Naples in the month of June are enough to consummate the perfumed death in Freiligrath's "Blumenrache," and then enough to cover the maiden's coffin from wider to narrowest end. It took two men to carry them, tied in huge bunches, along the Strada Caracciolo to the Palazzo Imparato.

Nino from his cab saw two men bearing white flowers far ahead of him, and wondered vaguely for whom they might be.

Then he thought of Nunziata's face as he had last seen it--pallid, with a tortured smile, as she said good-bye. But now he would see her smile again, that pretty tilted smile that was still young....

(The men with the flowers had turned a corner. Nino's cab turned it, too, and there were the men again, marching before him.)

He had been a brute and a hound, but he would atone. He would do the right thing. Nunziata should not be left in tears again, nor again be driven to the little brazier of coke, like a love-sick grisette....

(The men with the white flowers were alongside. Now they were left behind.)

And now the carriage stopped at the door of the Palazzo Imparato. The driver handed the luggage down, and a waiting lazzarone grabbed and shouldered it. While Nino was paying the fare the men with the flowers came up, and Nino turned to glance at them as they passed. _But they did not pass._ They turned into the Palazzo Imparato and vanished in the shadow of the gateway.

Nino's heart leaped up, and stood still. The lazzarone, watching him, saw tragedy in his face, and was satisfied that the tip would be a large one; for the lazzarone knew that despair is as generous as happiness.

Nino ran, blind with his terrors, up the wide flights of stairs. On Nunziata's landing the men with the flowers stood waiting.

Teresa opened the door, and saw behind the roses Nino's wild, white face.

"The Signorino! Santa Vergine!"

In an instantaneous vision she thought of the Illustrissima, unpowdered, unprepared, reading Matilde Serao, her tresses lying on the dressing-room table. The servant's stupefied, stricken face confirmed Nino's fears. He stumbled forward, and, dropping into a seat in the hall, covered his face with his hands.

The Illustrissima, who had heard the noise, opened the drawing-room door. At a glance she saw it all, and quietly closed the door again.

When, an instant later, Nino rushed in, the room was darkened, the shutters closed; Nunziata lay on the couch with etiolated face, a soft shimmering scarf was wound becomingly round her head, but no blue shadows were under her eyes, for there had been no time to make them.

Then all began over again; for although she was peaceful and comfortable when Nino was away, as soon as he was present she felt that all things depended upon his love, and that his absence would end her life. Tighter and tighter she grasped the little dead bird in her white, ringed hands, and louder and louder she told her tired heart that youth was living and singing still.

Nino was kind and considerate. He also wrote letters to the Italian Consulates in Rio and Buenos Ayres, asking them to make sure that Eduardo Villari was really dead--as his cook, who had returned with a good deal of money and had married a baron, declared he was.

If the thought of Nancy knocked with light fingers at Nino's heart, he never opened the door.

XV

Clarissa in her villa on Lake Maggiore was bored, so she wrote to Nancy to come and stay with her.

"I am weary of my sweet blue lake and of my sour blue husband. Come and stay with me a month. You shall have a large room at the top of the house, with a huge table and an inkstand large enough to drown in, and before you the view that inspired Manzoni. Come and write your masterpiece."

By the same post she sent a note to her brother-in-law:

"Aldo, _mon joli_, do come. Carlo is insufferable. He growls all day and snores all night. Why did I marry him? This is the fourth time I invite you this year, and you never come. Last year it was different.

"Yours, "CLARISSA.

"P.S.--The little _poetessa_ is going to stay here for a month."

He arrived next day. After greetings, he asked: "Where is Sappho, the violet-haired?" Clarissa explained that Nancy had not arrived, and he sulked and played the piano all the evening, while Carlo on the sofa snored. Clarissa looked from one to the other, uncertain which of the two was insulting her most.

Nancy arrived the following day. She had brought her notebooks with her and a broken ivory pen that she always wrote with; she was full of the masterpiece. She was going to work immediately.

Driving up from the landing-place to the Villa Solitudine she told her plans to Clarissa, who nodded and smiled as she whipped up the fat cob. She was going to write a book--_The Book!_--a great, noble piece of work, not a little volume of flyaway poems that one reads and forgets in a day. She was going to think of and dream of The Book; to live for The Book; to breathe and walk for it, to eat and sleep for it. In Milan, with people always round her, talking and distracting, it was impossible; but here in the large bare room at the top of the house----How sweet and dear of Clarissa to think of it! Never, never could Nancy thank her enough.... Clarissa nodded and smiled, and the fat cob turned into the chestnut drive of Villa Solitudine.

Down the steps, with a couple of dogs barking and leaping at his heels, came Aldo to meet them, clad in Neapolitan fashion in white flannels and scarlet sash. His uncovered head gleamed darkly in the sun.

"Behold Endymion awakened!" said Clarissa, laughing, to Nancy. "Charmides, Adonaïs, Narcissus! The gods have cast upon him all the beauty of the world!" As Nancy did not answer, Clarissa turned to look at her. "Oh, what a stern face, _ma chérie!_ You are quite white. What are you thinking of?"

"The Book," said Nancy; and she felt as if it were a child of hers that was to die unborn.

"You shall write it, _mon ange!_ Aldo shall not disturb you." And she threw the reins to the little stiff groom; then, daintily raising her fluffy skirts, she alighted in Aldo's uplifted arms. Nancy put her foot on the step, but Aldo raised her lightly and lifted her down. His red, smiling mouth was close to her face. She thanked him, and he kissed her hand with the ceremonious Southern salute, "Signora, I am your slave."

Nancy went to her room--the large, bare room with the beautiful view--and stayed there all the afternoon. She put her notes in order; she placed the large sheets of paper before her; and she dipped the broken ivory pen into the huge inkstand. Then she sat and looked out of the window. She could hear the dogs barking in the garden and Clarissa's trilling laugh. On the sweet blue lake a tiny sail, like a pocket handkerchief, dipped and curtseyed away, and through the open windows of the drawing-room Aldo could be heard playing a Valse Triste. Nancy dipped the pen into the inkstand again--and looked at the view.

Now she heard the music wander off in modulating chords which resolved themselves into the rippling accompaniment of Hugo Wolff's "Musikant."

"Wenn wir zwei zusammen wären Würd' das Singen mir vergeh'n."

She could hear the soft tenor voice, and felt it drawing at her heart. She closed the window and sat down again. She dipped the ivory pen into the inkstand, and wrote at the top of the white sheet, "Villa Solitudine," and the date. Under it, as she had not thought of a title yet, she wrote in large letters:

"THE BOOK."

Then she jumped up and ran downstairs.

At sunset they went out in a sailing-boat. Clarissa held the rudder, and Aldo stood in easy attitudes of beauty at the sail. The glow of the west was on his pure young face, and the wind of the _tramontana_ raised his waved hair and blew it lightly across his forehead. He was silent, satisfied to know that the two women could see him, and that the red-gold sky was a good background for his profile. Clarissa talked and laughed, twittered and purred; but Aldo never spoke. And it was his silence that enraptured Nancy.

"Ed io che intesi ciò che non dicevi, M'innamorai di te perchè tacevi."

Stecchetti's words sang in her brain with new meaning, and in the days that followed the two smooth lines were always in her mind.

Aldo knew little, but he knew the value of silence. He knew the lure of the _hortus conclusus_--the Closed Garden into which one has not stepped. Nancy stood outside its gates and dreamed of its unseen roses, of fountains and shadowy paths and water-lilied lakes. For Aldo was a closed garden.

Aldo also knew the value of his eyes--deep, passion-lit eyes, that looked, Clarissa said, as if he had rubbed the lids with burnt cork to darken them. When he raised them suddenly, and looked straight at Nancy, she felt a little shock of pleasure that took her breath away. Little by little, day by day, those eyes drew Nancy's spirit to their depths--she leaned over them as over an abyss. In them she sunk and drowned her soul.... Then, when from his eyes her own passionate purity gazed back at her, she thought she saw his soul and not her own.

The Book cried in her now and then, but she stifled its voice and whispered: "Wait!"

And The Book waited.

One day in the garden Aldo spoke to Clarissa. She was in the hammock pretending to read.

"Clarissa, I am twenty-five years old."

"Vlan! ça y est!" said Clarissa, dropping her book. Then she drew a deep breath, and her nostrils turned a little pale; but the superposed roses of her cheeks bloomed on, independent of her ebbing blood and sickening heart.

"I am penniless," continued Aldo, picking a piece of grass and chewing it; "and Carlo has given me to understand that he can exist without me if he tries very hard."

Clarissa sat up. "When? What did he say? Does he ... has he ... did he mean anything?"

Aldo shook his comely head. "Carlo never means anything. But I shall have to go back to--to the Texas ranch, or marry."

The Texas ranch was a romantic invention of Clarissa's, the only foundation for which was a three weeks' holiday which Aldo had once spent in the city of New York.

Clarissa bit her red, narrow lips. "Yes," she said.

During the long pause that followed Aldo picked another piece of grass and chewed it.

"I suppose," said Clarissa, looking at him sideways through her long lids, "you will marry some affectionate old thing with money."

"No. I know them," said Aldo. "They demand the affection, and keep the money."

After a pause, in which he felt Clarissa's angry eyes on his face, he said: "I am going to marry the little Sappho."

Clarissa laughed suddenly and loud. "You do that for your pleasure! _Farceur, va!_" Aldo lifted his perfect eyebrows and did not reply. "She has nothing, not a little black sou!" And Clarissa stuck her long pointed thumbnail behind her long pointed teeth and jerked it forward.

"Oh! I dare say she has something," said Aldo, pretending to yawn carelessly. "Besides, she is a genius, and can earn what she will."

"You are the perfect Neapolitan pig," said Clarissa, and closed her eyes.

The perfect Neapolitan pig rose with an offended air and left her. He strolled into the house and took his hat and stick, then he strolled out again and through the garden into the hot street and down to the landing-place. A boat was leaving for Intra, so he went on board, and at Intra took the train for Milan. He dined at Biffi's, feeling happy.

"They will be miserable," he said. "That will teach them." Then he went to his furnished rooms on the Corso, and slept well.

In Villa Solitudine they were miserable, and it taught them.

It taught Nancy that the Closed Garden she had had a glimpse of for so brief an hour was the only garden in the world that she ever wanted to enter; and that all the words Aldo had not said were the only words she ever wanted to hear; that perfect goodness and unwavering strength must lie behind his portentous beauty, white and immovable like marble lions at a palace gate.

It taught Clarissa that one must accept the inevitable--that half a loaf was better than no bread, and that a married Aldo was better than no Aldo at all. It made her look at Nancy with closer eyes, and say to herself that she was a little creature one would easily tire of, in spite of--or because of--her intellectuality. Aldo was not a closed garden for Clarissa; she knew the feeble flowers that bowed behind its gates.

A hot, dreary week passed with no news from Aldo. Then Clarissa telegraphed to him at Milan. She said she had told Carlo about their conversation regarding his wish to marry Nancy, and Carlo approved. Would he come back?

Yes; Aldo would come back. He waited another day or two, and at the close of a sultry afternoon he sauntered in, just as he had sauntered out, across the sleepy, bee-droning lawns of the Villa Solitudine. He stopped at the entrance of the summer-house, where Nancy sat reading a letter--a long letter. Already two of the blue sheets had fallen at her side. Before her on the table was the inkstand and the ivory pen and The Book. As his shadow passed the threshold she looked up; she drew a quick breath, and her face turned milky white, with a pallor that gripped at Aldo's nerves.

Once more, and for the last time, he bent his head over her hand. "Signora, I am your slave," he said. But as he raised his eyes she knew that he had said: "Nancy, I am your master."

"Who writes to you?" he asked.

She drooped submissive lashes, and the colour ran into her cheeks. "Mr. Kingsley, the English friend," she said. "Do you remember him?"

Aldo took her hand and with it the letter in his own.

"What does he want?"

Her dimples fluttered. "He wants me to be good," she said, laughing, with wistful eyes. "And to write."

Aldo pressed the little fist with the crumpled blue letter in it to his lips. "Well, write," he said. "Write at once."

He took the ivory pen and dipped it in the ink and put it in her hand; then he pulled the sheet of white paper which was to be The Book before her.

"Write: 'Dear Englishman, I am going to marry Aldo della Rocca. He adores me.'"

And Nancy, with her hair almost touching the paper, wrote: "Dear Englishman, I am going to marry Aldo della Rocca. I adore him."

The Englishman never got the letter. But he heard of it afterwards; and his English fists closed tight.

XVI

Nancy walked among asphodels and morning glory; and her soul was plunged in happiness and her eyes were washed with light.

The Book waited.

They went out in the little boat at sunset. Aldo stood at the sail, and the red sky was a background for his profile.

"Oh," sighed Nancy, looking at him and clasping puerile hands, "your beauty _aches_ me!"

Aldo quite understood it, and was pleased.

They went for long walks to Premeno and San Salvatore; as Clarissa refused to accompany them, Carlo chaperoned them, blandly bored.

Soon Valeria arrived. Nancy went down to meet her at the landing-place, looking ethereal and pink as a spray of apple-blossom. Valeria kissed her with hot tears. "Oh! my baby, my baby!" she said, and wished that the seventeen years were a dream, and that her child's small head were still safely nestling at her breast. In Nancy's young love she lived the days of her own betrothal over again, and Tom arose in her memory and was with her day and night. On this same silky blue lake Tom had so often rowed her with Zio Giacomo, in a little boat called _Luisa_. She tearfully begged Nancy and Aldo to come with her and see if they could not find that very self-same boat.

They found, indeed, three _Luisas_, but Valeria could not recognize them; still, all three of the boatmen declared that they remembered her perfectly, and got the expected tip.

"Of course," said Valeria, deeply moved, "it cannot have been all three of them."

And Aldo said: "You should not have given them anything. They were none of them more than twenty-five years old." Whereupon Valeria sighed deeply.

Then it was decided that they should go in reverent pilgrimage to the Madonna del Monte, where Nancy's father had asked Nancy's mother to marry him. The road was lined with beggars: shouting cripples, exhibiting sores and stumps.

"Some of these are very old," sighed Valeria. "I am sure they were here that day, and must have seen me."

"I shall give a franc to every one of them," said Nancy, taking out her small fat purse, as the first one-armed mendicant held out his greasy hat.

"My dear Nancy, what nonsense!" said Aldo. "There are about a hundred of them!"

"Well?" and Nancy raised clear, questioning eyes to his.

"Oh, _I_ don't mind," said Aldo, with a little Neapolitan shrug.

Valeria looked at the handsome figure and impeccable profile of her future son-in-law, as he strolled beside them up the steep wide road. Her heart was heavy with recollections. Up this road she had walked in her blue dress and scarlet tie with Tom beside her--Tom, broad and careless in his slouchy brown suit, who had given the beggars all his coppers and silver, just as Tom's daughter was doing to-day. Again she looked at Aldo's slim, straight shoulders and sighed. "I wish it had been an Englishman!" she thought. Then, as her memory took her to England, she saw someone else. "Or, then, poor dear Nino." And she sighed again; but not altogether for Nancy's sake.

She wrote to Nino that evening, and, almost without knowing it, began her letter, "Poor dear Nino!"

Nino was out interviewing Consuls about the presumably deceased Eduardo Villari when the letter arrived. So Nunziata opened the letter.

In it Valeria told Nino that Nancy, "our little Nancy," was betrothed to Aldo della Rocca, and could Nino not do anything to prevent it? And why, oh why, had his sister Clarissa invited them both to stay at the Villa Solitudine, so that, as Fräulein Müller or was it Heine?--used to say, "Wie könnte es anders sein," for how could anyone see Nancy in the resplendency of her seventeen Aprils and not fall in love with her? And oh, she was so sorry for poor, dear Nino, for she knew the secret of his heart. And how true it was what he had said about Nancy's eyes being so pure that they seemed never to have gazed at aught but the sky; and she understood him and his sufferings, for had she not herself suffered dreadfully through him, years ago--but never mind, that was nothing. And it had never been dear, dear Nino's fault at all; it was her own foolish fault and Fate.... And she hoped Nino did not think that she had really suffered, for she had not, and now she never, never thought of it any more! And if he came quickly he might still be in time; and oh, she knew he must be heart-broken, but he was not to mind, because it could not be helped. And she was ever his unhappy Valeria.

Nunziata read the rambling letter three times before she understood it. The letter opened her eyes.

When her eyes were open Nunziata saw well. She saw the chain of desire stretching out ring on ring: from Valeria's heart to Nino; from Nino's heart to Nancy; from Nancy's heart to Aldo, as in a children's game; and Love passing down from one to the other, stopping before each with gift of passion, of pain, of joy. She saw that her years placed her behind Valeria--far back, far back, out of the game; and she knew that Love had passed her, and would not stop before her any more. Then she remembered that she had had her gifts; that Love had heaped roses at her feet, and that she had moved through passions as through a field of flowers.

Nunziata decided that she would play the game.

She went with her newly-opened eyes to her room and threw the shutters back. She looked at her tired pink face in the glass, at her crimson lips and complicated hair. She went on her knees beside her bed and said three _Paters_ and three Aves. Then she opened her reluctant hands and gave her dead youth back to God.

She washed her face with warm water and soap, and unpinned her elaborate curls. She wound her own soft hair round her head, and put on a plain black gown. Then, looking, although she did not think so, twenty years younger and twenty times sweeter than she did before, she went downstairs to wait for Nino.

* * * * *

That same evening she sent him back to his father. His luggage was packed and the brougham was waiting for him at the door, and still he declared he would not go. He would not leave her. Her face was whiter than any _poudre de lys_ could ever make it as she kissed his forehead, and blessed it with the sign of the cross, and told him that he must indeed go, and not return again.

At last, before his stubborn refusal, she took the weapon that hurt her most, and used it to pierce her own heart. "Think of Nancy!" she said. "You may still be in time to prevent her from marrying an adventurer."

Nino looked into the pale, kind face, from which every trace of triviality had been washed by the warm water and the tears. And, being a man, he did not wait, and refuse, and then catch a later train; but with candid cruelty he said: "You are right. You are an angel. May the saints bless you!"

... She stood on the balcony and watched the carriage drive away into the night; it turned up Corso Umberto and was gone. With it the lights went out in Nunziata Villari's life.

Youth, love, hope, desire--Fate blew all the candles out, and left her in the dark.

XVII

Aldo's curved red lips under his very young moustache opened to words as well as to kisses under Nancy's impelling, eager love. During the long hours they spent together she spoke and he must answer. His splendid, silent eyes urged her to quick questionings, and his kisses did not still the thirst of her soul for his soul. Little by little she pushed back the gates of the Closed Garden; gently, day by day, she ventured a step farther adown the mysterious paths. Where are the arbours of roses? Where the fountains and the deep, water-lilied lakes? She tiptoed down the narrow paths that Clarissa and many others had trodden before her, and when she had come to the end she said: "I am mistaken. I have not entered the Garden yet."

They were to be married almost at once. Aldo was impatient, and Nancy was in love; and The Book was waiting. So Valeria left for Milan to prepare the trousseau, and Nancy must follow a week later. On the eve of her journey Clarissa went up to say good-night to Nancy in her room--the large, bare room in which the masterpiece had not been written. Nancy's trunks were packed. The ivory pen and The Book were put away. The large inkstand stood alone on the large table.

Nancy was leaning out of the window looking at the stars. Clarissa came and stood behind her and looked up into the cobalt depths.

"I hate the stars," said Nancy; "I am afraid of them."

"Why?" said Clarissa, to whom a star was a star.

"Oh, I want to be sure that somewhere they leave off," said Nancy. "It terrifies me to think of fabulous nothingness behind unending space, of perpetual neverness beyond unceasing time. I should like a wall built round the universe, a wall that would shut me safely in, away from the terrible infinity."

Clarissa laughed. "Perhaps when you are married you will feel less little and lonely."

"Perhaps," said Nancy. And she added: "Aldo must be the wall."

"Oh, my dear," said Clarissa, "Don't try to make poor Aldo anything that he isn't. He is sweet; he is lovely; he is full of talent. But he is no more a wall than this is." And she waved her filmy gossamer scarf that blew lightly in the air.

That evening Carlo said to his wife: "I feel like a brute, letting that good-for-nothing brother of mine marry the nice little girl. He will make her miserable."

"Not at all," said Clarissa, putting out the candle with her book, a thing Carlo could not bear. "She will write poems on his profile and be perfectly happy, until she gets tired of him for not being something that he isn't."

"Oh, well," growled Carlo. "I suppose you know her best. Women are cackling cats."

"Mixed metaphor," murmured Clarissa, and went to sleep comfortably, feeling that Carlo was a wall.

* * * * *

Nancy was married in Rome. All the poets of Italy came with poems, and Nino brought a necklet of pearls. From the Quirinal came a pendant, with a picture of a boy's face set in diamonds.

After the wedding-breakfast all the guests left, passing to their carriages down the red carpet that stretched from the door to the edge of the pavement. Then Nancy, in her mouse-grey travelling-gown, kissed Valeria, and wept and said good-bye. And kissed Nino, and wept and said good-bye. And she went with her husband down the red carpet to the carriage. Carlo and Clarissa, Aunt Carlotta and Adèle followed to the station, where there were great crowds waiting to see them off.

Valeria and Nino remained alone in the desolate room. Valeria's face was hidden in her hands. She was looking down the days of the future, and saw them lonely, dark and desolate. Nino gazed through tear-blurred eyes at the bowed figure before him, and his thoughts went back through the years. Bending forward, he took her hand and kissed it. She smiled wanly.

"What are you thinking of?" she said.

"I was thinking of Nancy, and of the past," said Nino. "Of her father, poor Tom, who died so suddenly----"

"It was to save Nancy," said Valeria.

"And of the old grandfather who died alone on the hill-side----"

"We had to find Nancy," said Valeria.

"And of little Edith and her poor mother, forsaken in their darkest hour by those they loved----"

"But it was to safeguard Nancy," said Valeria.

Hearing her words, he realized the puissance of all-conquering, maternal love. Nothing mattered but Nancy, though Nancy herself, with gentle, unconscious hands, had taken all things from her. Had not he himself, the lover of Valeria's girlhood, turned from her, heart-stricken for Nancy?

There was a pause.

"And I am thinking of you, Valeria, over whose heart I have trampled,..." said Nino, with a break in his voice.

"You could not help it. You loved Nancy," said Valeria. "And now"--her pitying eyes filled with tears--"your hope is shipwrecked and your heart broken, too."

Nino did not answer. He turned away and gazed out of the window. He was thinking of Nancy, so mild and sweet-voiced, with eyes like blue hyacinths under the dark drift of her hair. And once more he realized how Nancy in her dove-like innocence had absorbed and submerged the existence of those around her. Her sweet helplessness itself had wrecked and shattered, had devastated and destroyed. The lives of all those who loved her had gone to nourish the clear flame of her genius, the white fire of her youth.

Nino gazed down at the red wedding-carpet that stretched its scarlet line to the pavement's edge like a narrow path of blood.

"Behold," he said, "the trail of the dear devourer--the course of the dove of prey!"

* * * * *

As the train glided out of the station, and shook and ran, and the cheers and the waving handkerchiefs were left behind, Nancy raised her eyes, tender and tear-lit, to Aldo's face. Her white wedded hand was to open the gates of the Closed Garden.

Now the bowers of roses, and the fountains, and the water-lilied lakes!

XVIII

They had chosen to go to Paris, because Aldo said he had had enough of landscapes to last him a lifetime. Also Clarissa had remarked to Nancy: "If you want to have a clear vision of life, and a well-balanced brain, always be properly dressed. And you cannot be dressed at all unless you are dressed by Paquin."

"But I have my work to think about," said Nancy. "I do not mind much about clothes."

"Very well," said Clarissa, "if you want to be a dowdy genius and quarrel with your husband before you have been married two months, go your own way, and wear coats and skirts."

So they went to Paris, and soon Paquin's gibble-gabbling demoiselles were busy sewing cloudy blues and faint mauves to save Nancy from quarrelling with Aldo two months afterwards.

At Aldo's suggestion they took rooms in a small hotel in Rue Lafayette, for, as he said, they were not millionaires, and one could use one's money better than in spending it at grand hotels. Nancy said he was quite right, and wondered at his wisdom. Indeed, he knew many things. He knew the prices of everything one ate, and he pounced on the waiters as soon as there was any attempt at overcharging, or if they absent-mindedly reckoned in the date written at the top of the bill in a line with the francs.

Nancy rather dreaded that moment in the brilliant restaurant when Aldo opened and inspected the neatly-folded bill, while the solemn-nosed waiter looked down sarcastically at his smooth, well-brushed head. Nancy noticed that, whenever they entered a place, everyone ran to meet them, opening doors for them with obsequious bows, showing them places with flourish of arm and of table-napkin. Aldo's hat was taken from him with reverential hand, and her cloak was carried tenderly from her. But when, after settling the bill, they got up to go, nobody seemed to pay much attention to them. Aldo had to fetch his own hat and look for the cloak, and even to open the heavy glass doors himself, for the small boy would be absent, or looking another way and making faces at the head-waiter. Cabs also had a way of being all smiles and hat-touchings and little jokes when they were hailed, and all sullenness and loud monologue when they were dismissed.

"They think that because we are on our honeymoon we must be fools. Money is money," said Aldo.

He had learnt the phrase from his grandfather, who had kept a shop in Via Caracciolo. The grandfather's wife--who in her radiant girlhood in Piedigrotta had sat for English and German painters--had said: "Yes; but education is education," and had sent her three sons to school in Modena and Milan. The eldest son, who was the father of Carlo and Aldo, had then learnt to say: "A gentleman is a gentleman." And on the strength of this he would have nothing more to do with his shopkeeping parents in Naples. When he died Carlo, who was twenty, went and hunted up the old people. They did not need him, and were afraid of him, and called him "Eccellenza." But Aldo, who was thirteen, and unverisimilarly beautiful, they called "l'Amorino"; they petted and spoiled him, and let him count the money in the till. And he liked them and their shop. And he learnt that money was money. The phrase always struck Nancy mute. Aldo, strolling beside her along the boulevard, continued: "It is people like Carlo that spoil things. Carlo is a perfect idiot with his money."

"Oh, but he is very kind," said Nancy; and Aldo wondered whether she knew that Carlo was paying all their expenses--made out with fanciful additions by Aldo--and had promised to do so for a year after their marriage.

"After that, not one penny. Never as long as I live," Carlo had said to his young brother a week before the wedding. "So hustle and do something useful."

But Aldo did not intend to hustle. Rude, unæsthetic word! A man with his physique could not hustle. Carlo lacked all sense of the fitness of things. Clarissa said so, too. But on this occasion Aldo did not consult Clarissa, because she had once said: "I understand adoring a man, but I do not understand paying his debts."

Nancy soon found that Aldo's knowledge extended further than accounts and prices. He knew places in Paris, and he knew people--such places and such people as she had never heard of, read of, or dreamt of. He always said to Nancy: "Now you shall see things that will make you laugh." But Nancy laughed little, then less; until one day she could not laugh at all. She felt as if she would never laugh any more. Everything was horrible, everything made her shrink and weep.

"It is life, my dear," said Aldo, with his habitual little gesture of both hands outwards and upwards. "How can you write books if you do not know what is life?"

Oh, but she did not want to know what is life. She could write books without knowing. And oh, she wished that Aldo did not know either. And let them go away quickly, and forget, and never, never remember it any more.

So Aldo, who was not unkind, and who had not found the enlightening of Nancy as amusing as he had expected, called for the hotel bill, said it was preposterous, got the proprietor to deduct twelve per cent., and then told him they were leaving the next day.

The next day they left. They went to the Villa Solitudine, which Clarissa and Carlo were not using, and for which it was arranged that Aldo should pay rent to Clarissa. Clarissa let him off the rent; and Carlo, not knowing, paid it back to him. So that, on the whole, it was not an unprofitable arrangement for Aldo.

Nancy tried to forget what life was, and smiled and blossomed in tenuous sunrise beauty. And because of all she knew, and was trying to forget, and because she wore trailing Parisian gowns and large, plumed hats, Aldo burned with volcanic meridional love for her.

The Book waited.

One evening, when Aldo was at the piano, improvising music and words on Nancy's loveliness, and she sat on a stool beside him, she asked suddenly: "When shall we begin to work?"

"Oh, never!" said Aldo, putting his right arm round her neck without interrupting the chords he was playing with his left hand.

Nancy laughed, and laid her head against his arm.

"Oh, but we must, Aldo. I want to write my book. It is to be a great book."

Aldo nodded, and went on playing.

"And you, Aldo. You cannot pass your life saying that you adore me."

"Oh yes, I can," said Aldo.

Nancy laughed softly and kissed his sleeve. Then suddenly a strange feeling came over her--a feeling of loneliness and fear. She felt as if she were alone in the world, and small and helpless, with no one to take care of her. She felt as if Aldo were younger and weaker and more helpless than she. And the terror of the Infinite fell upon her soul. Aldo was singing softly, meltingly, with his head bent forward and his dark hair falling over his face. Suddenly Nancy thought that it would be good to be safely locked in a large light room with nothing but books and an inkstand, and someone walking up and down outside with a gun.

"The wall!" she said to herself as the Englishman's light eyes and stalwart figure came before her mind. Then she said: "Work shall be my wall." And she went to her room and unpacked her ivory pen.

XIX

Four months before the year of Carlo's bounty was up, Aldo made up his mind that he must hustle after all. They had settled in Milan; then nothing had happened. Carlo would never change his mind. Valeria had shown him her banking account, and proved to him that there was nothing Nancy could have beyond her skimpy forty thousand francs; Lady Sainsborough, the elderly English person in Naples who had taken such a fancy to him, had not answered his last two letters, and had probably altered her will; so there was nothing to do or to hope for. He must hustle.

He did so. He wrote a third letter to Lady Sainsborough. Then he decided to ask Carlo to make room for him in his silk mills, which Carlo refused to do.

Then he looked up Nancy's publishers, and asked them if they would advance a substantial sum on the unwritten book, which they also refused to do. So having done all he could, he decided not to hustle any more, but to let events take their course.

Nancy did not help him at all. She was selfishly engrossed in her book, and sat in her room all day, with hair pinned tightly back and wild and lucent eyes. Whenever he came into the room she put up her hand without turning round--a gesture he could not bear--and went on with her writing. If he disregarded the gesture, she looked up at him with those wild, light eyes, and he felt hurried, and forgot what he wanted to say. So he muddled along with her forty thousand francs, and read the papers, played the piano, and went out to the Caffè Biffi every evening until it was time to go to the Patriottica for a game of billiards.

There he frequently saw Nino sitting glumly with the corners of his mouth turned down; and they turned down further when Aldo came in, so that Aldo positively hated the sight of him. Besides, Carlo, who had refused to do anything for Aldo, had actually taken Nino into partnership; and, just to irritate and show off, Nino was working vulgarly, like a nigger, twelve or fourteen hours a day. The gratified Carlo was to be seen with Nino in the evenings walking through the Galleria arm-in-arm with him as if they were brothers, with that absurd Zio Giacomo trotting alongside, grinning like an old hen, while he, Aldo, Carlo's own brother, had to mooch about alone, smoking cheap cigarettes, or else to run alongside of Giacomo like an outsider, and listen for the thousandth time to the recital of the prodigal Nino's reform and rehabilitation.

He went to Clarissa and complained; but she was unsympathetic. She rubbed her left-hand nails against her right-hand palm and looked out of the window. He had expected her to pass a white, jewelled hand lightly over his bowed head and say, "_Povero bello!_ Poor beauteous one!" as she had sometimes done a year or so ago; but when he bowed his head she continued rubbing the nails of her left hand against her right-hand palm and looking out of the window.

He felt that a great deal depended upon her friendship, and it was almost out of a sense of duty to Nancy that he grasped her hand and kissed it in his best and softest manner. "Oh, don't be a snail, Aldo," said Clarissa, taking her hand away. Then she looked down at him and shook her head: "I _am_ thankful I married Carlo."

This was untrue, of course, said Aldo to himself; but, added to the other things, it rankled. When he left her he understood that Clarissa considered him as much Nancy's property as the pair of antique silver candle-sticks she had given to Nancy for a wedding-present, and that never would she take them back or light the candles in them again.

Nancy had written one-third of The Book. It was a great book--a book the world would speak of. Like the portent of Jeanne of Orleans, a vision had fallen upon her young, white heart and set it aflame. She felt genius like an eagle beating great wings against her temples. Inspiration, nebulous and wan, stretched thin arms to her, and young ideas went shouting through her brain. Then the phrase, like a black-and-white flower, rolled back its thundering petals, and the masterpiece was born.

XX

Aldo was not allowed to play the piano any more, because it disturbed Nancy's thoughts. He also stayed at home to see anyone who called, so that Nancy should not be interrupted. He himself brought her meals into her room when she did not wish to break her train of thought by going to table, and when the loud-footed, cheerful servant annoyed and distracted her.

A reverential hush was on the house.

The Rome publisher, Servetti, heard of The Book, and came to Milan to ask if he could have it. Zardo, the publisher of the "Cycle of Lyrics," who had omitted to pay for the last two editions of that distinguished and fortunate volume, sent, unasked, an unverisimilarly large cheque; and suggested for her new work a special _édition de luxe_. Nancy replied to no one, heeded no one. The Book held her soul.

It was a winter evening, and the lamps were lit, when Nancy wrote at the summit of a candid page, "Chapter XVII." She wrote the heading carefully, reverentially, painting over the Roman numbers with loving pen. This was the culminating chapter of The Book. It had been worked up to in steep and audacious ascent, and after it and from it the story would flow down in rushing, inevitable stream to its portentous close. But this chapter was the climax and the crown.

Nancy passed a quick hand across her forehead and pushed back her ruffled hair. Then she looked across at Aldo. He was sitting at the opposite side of the table with some sheets of music-paper before him. The shine of the lamp fell blandly on his narrow head. He looked dejected and dull.

"What is it, Aldo?" she asked, stretching her hand affectionately across the table to him. In the joy and the overflowing ease of inspiration she felt kind and compassionate.

"Oh, nothing," sighed Aldo. "I was thinking of writing a symphony; but I cannot do anything without trying it at the piano. And that disturbs you. Never mind! Don't worry about me."

"Oh, but I do worry," said Nancy, getting up and going round to his side. She bent over him with her arm on his shoulder. Before him on the sheet was half a line of breves and semibreves, which Nancy remembered from her childhood as little men getting over stiles.

"You know," said Aldo, with his pen going over and over the face of one of the little men and making it blacker and larger than the others, "Ricordi is publishing those songs of mine; but I believe it is only because they have your words. So I thought I would try a symphony which will be all my own. But I ought to be able to try it at the piano."

"I know, dear," said Nancy, smoothing his soft, thick hair. "I know I am a horrid, selfish thing, upsetting everything and everybody. But never mind!" And she glanced across to the large "Chapter XVII" at the top of the fair sheet, and the wet ink of the "XVII" glistened and beckoned to her upside down at the other side of the table. "Wait till I have finished my book. Then you shall do all you want; and we shall go and pass blue days in the country and be as happy as sandboys, and"--she added for him--"as rich as Cr[oe]sus."

He raised his dark eyes to her, and she thought that he looked like Murillo's Saint Sebastian.

"Your writing has swallowed up all your love for me," he said.

"Oh no!" said Nancy, and she caressed the beautiful brow. "It is you, your presence, your beauty, that inspires me and helps me to write."

Aldo sighed. "I suppose I am a nonentity. And I must be grateful if the fact of my having a straight nose has helped you to write your book."

Nancy felt conscience-stricken. "Don't be bitter, dear heart," she said. "I must be selfish! If I do not sit there and write, I feel as if I had a maniac shut up in my brain, beating and shrieking to get out. And oh, Aldo, when I do write, coolly and quickly and smoothly, I feel like a mountain-spring gushing out my life in glad, scintillant waters."

Aldo drew her face down and kissed her. "Nothing shall interfere with your book," he said.

"No, nothing," said Nancy--"nothing!"

As she spoke a strange, quivering sensation passed over her, a quick throb shook her heart, and the roots of her hair prickled. Then it was past and gone. She stepped back to her place at the table and stood looking down at Chapter XVII. The wet ink still glistened on it. She was waiting.... She knew she was waiting for that strange throb to clutch at her heart again. She looked across at Aldo. He was thoughtfully painting the face of another semibreve and making it large and black. She sat down and dipped the ivory pen into the gaping mouth of the inkstand.

Ah, _again!_ the throb! the throb! like a soft hand striking at her heart. And now a flutter as of an imprisoned bird!

"Aldo! Aldo!" she cried, falling forward with her face hidden on her arm. And her waving hair trailed over Chapter XVII, and blurred the waiting page.

XXI

NANCY stirred, sighed, and awoke.

In the room adjoining, Valeria was sobbing in Zio Giacomo's arms, and Aunt Carlotta was kissing Adèle, and Aldo was shaking hands with everybody.

Nancy could hear the whispering voices through the half-open door, and they pleased her. Then another sound fell on her ear, like the ticking of a slow clock--click, click, a gentle, peaceful, regular noise that soothed her. She turned her head and looked. It was the cradle. The Sister sat near it, dozing, with one elbow on the back of the chair and her hand supporting her head; the other hand was on the edge of the cradle. With gentle mechanical gesture, in her half sleep, she rocked it to and fro. Nancy smiled to herself, and the gentle clicking noise lulled her near to sleep again.

She felt utterly at peace--utterly happy. The waiting was over; the fear was over. Life opened wider portals over wider, shining lands. All longings were stilled; all empty places filled. Then with a soft tremor of joy she remembered her book. It was waiting for her where she had left it that evening when futurity had pulsed within her heart. The masterpiece that was to live called softly and the folded wings of the eagle stirred.

* * * * *

In the gently-rocking twilight of the cradle the baby opened its eyes and said: "I am hungry."