hands away from him very gently.

'Don't you see, Dino, that I know it all? I heard what you and my father said.'

He caught hold of one of her hands again, and grasped it between both his own. 'Italia!—oh, my poor child, my poor little girl, to think that you should have heard that! You know I did not mean to hurt you, dear. You know, Italia! you do know, that I love you.'

A wave of colour passed over her white cheek. Her eyelids trembled, but she did not look at him.

'I heard—what you said,' she repeated in a very low voice.

He pressed her hand more tightly.

'Italia—I——'

The utter hopelessness of it all overcame him; the impossibility of explaining anything. His fingers relaxed he turned away and leaned against one of the rough stone columns. 'You are quite right. There is no reason why you should believe me. But I thought you would,' he said, with a burst of passionate despair.

A quiver passed over her face as he released her hands; she drew them under her shawl, and stood facing him. It was a moment of horrible suffering to Dino before she spoke.

'I do believe you. Please do not be unhappy about that. I cannot understand it—altogether; but I do believe you—Dino,' she answered gently. She hesitated a little in speaking, and her voice faltered over his name. She added more firmly: 'That is what I wanted to say to you. Please do not be unhappy about me. My father—my father wanted you to say that you would give up other things, things you care for, for my sake. But I do not wish it. I only want you to do what is best; what will make you more happy.'

'Happy!' echoed Dino with a groan.

'Yes, Dino, happy. Happier at least than you would have been if you—if you had not found out your mistake in time. It was a mistake that you loved me best,' said Italia bravely, crushing her poor little hands tightly together beneath her shawl; 'but I know it was not your fault. I know you did not mean to hurt me.'

'I would rather—I would rather have died than hurt you! Yet I deserve every word that your father said. I deserve a thousand times more. I had no right to speak to you when I did. I must not—I cannot ask you to marry me, Italia.'

Her head drooped a little. 'I know it,' she said, almost in a whisper, 'and that is why I do not want you to blame yourself for what has happened. If you have promised things to other people—— My father always said that one must keep one's word.' She turned her face away abruptly. 'I am glad that—that I was not mistaken in everything. I am glad to know that you did love me.'

'More than my life!' said Dino, with a solemn ardour. She looked so simply noble in her sorrow, he could have knelt before her as before a saint.

She drew in her breath sharply with a half sob. 'That is what I wished to say to you. Do not be troubled when you think of me. I shall always trust you. If—if we could have gone on caring for one another, I should always have been your friend as well as your sweetheart. At least—whatever other people claim from you—there can be no harm in my still being your friend; perhaps it may make you glad sometimes to know that there is one person who trusts you.'

She let her hands fall to her side, and drew a step farther back with an action full of the gentlest dignity. 'Will you go now, Dino? I would rather that you went.'

'I will go. Will you not look at me once more, Italia?'

She hesitated for a second or two, and then, slowly, she lifted her large dark eyes. Her white face above the straight sombre folds of her mantle made her seem like the pale ghost of the radiant Italia of yesterday. His heart gave a great throb of love and passionate pity.

'My poor little girl, how I have hurt you! My poor little child!'

'Don't be sorry,' she said faintly, her eyes filling suddenly with tears. She tried to smile, but her lips only quivered pitifully. She could not speak: she lifted her arm and pointed to the stair.

When he looked back she was kneeling with clasped hands before the image of the Madonna above the closed church door.

*****

The air was very fresh and cool. The early morning dew was lying thickly on the soft powdery dust of the high road, and on the short crisp turf of the downs. As Dino reached the turning in the path the first red light of the rising sun touched the black belfry above the church, and glittered here and there on some of the higher windows in the village. Far below him, seen between the folding of the downs, a white mist was lying over the motionless gray plain of the sea.

Afterwards, he could never remember very distinctly what he had done with himself that day. There was nothing to call him back to Leghorn. There seemed nothing to call him back anywhere. Until Valdez should summon him, he was powerless to act: had he not committed himself, his life, his future, had he not delivered it all over, bound hand and foot, into the inexorable grasp of those men? And what did it matter how or when it was disposed of?

For the moment, he felt so indifferent to all that concerned himself that, had Valdez been there before him, he would not have asked him a single question. That he was to forfeit his life in this proposed attempt was so much a foregone conclusion he did not even think of it. He could have sworn that he had never thought of it once since that first branding instant of revelation; but the conviction of it had eaten its way into him until it had become a part of his slightest, most involuntary action. When he spoke of 'next year,' 'next month,' when he used the very word 'to-morrow,' he checked himself like a man on the verge of betraying a secret; it seemed to him so incredible that he alone, among all the living, breathing creatures about him, should stand unobserved, encompassed by the very shadow of death. When his mother looked at him suddenly he felt that she must read his sentence on his face. At times he was filled with a dull wonder at their blindness; it was like slowly sinking in a quicksand while they stood near, looking on with smiling eyes.

Scarcely more than a week had passed since the blow first struck him. He was, as yet, benumbed, paralyzed by the icy clasp of the inevitable. He was isolated; cut off suddenly from all his past; the possibility of revolt had not yet occurred to him; the craving for life, mere life, had not awakened; all his experiences had changed at the same moment; he had not had time to grow accustomed to the new conditions, to realise the inextricable inescapable claims of habit. He was like a man shipwrecked, and keeping a precarious footing upon some slippery rock in mid-ocean; his actions, his preoccupations, were so many temporary measures. He was engrossed in the present precisely because he had no future.

Could he have been asked, that is, more or less, the account he would have given of himself. But in truth, he did not realise the situation. And how could he?—while the young blood ran easily and warmly in his veins, and the morning air tasted freshly, and there was no sense of physical effort in scaling the steepest crest of these hills. The very fulness of his life deceived him. He thought himself resigned to lose all because he could not—he was incapable of comprehending the final loss of anything. For the present, his youth, his sense of vitality, were lying dormant, silenced and motionless like that sleeping sea.

But indeed he was not conscious of himself this morning. He walked for hours, steadily, determinedly; stopping at the top of every hill to look back at the country beneath him with a blank mechanical stare. He could never remember of what he had been thinking, or if he had been thinking of anything at all. There was nothing left of this day in his memory but a confused recollection of wide grassy spaces where the wind was the only thing living, and the face of a shepherd to whom he spoke about mid-day, and the sight of many fields planted with vines.