on's road. On it was
the curious inscription: "Remember eternal at my heart. February, 1881."

"It is so strange," Mary said, trying to seem at ease, and not show the
slightest emotion. It was ridiculous to feel emotion! Yet she could not
help being absurdly happy, because this man who had snubbed her once and
apparently disapproved her always was speaking to her of his own accord,
in kindness.

"'Remember eternal at my heart?' It's like the English of a person not
English. But why did he not have the words put in his own language,
which he knew?"

"That is what everybody wonders," Vanno said, finding it as difficult as
Mary found it, not to show that this conversation was of immense,
exciting importance. "It puzzled me so much when I first came this way
that I couldn't get it out of my head. I asked a friend who has lived
for years not many miles away, if he could tell me what it meant."

"And could he tell you?"

"He told me a story which he believed but would not vouch for. Only, a
very old inhabitant told it to him. It appeals to me as true. It must be
true." A new warmth stole into Vanno's voice as he spoke. They had both
been looking up at the tablet on the rock, but as that thrill like a
chord on a violin struck her ear, Mary turned to him. Their eyes met, as
they had so often met, but to-day there was no coldness in Vanno's, or
hurt pride in Mary's.

"Can you think of any reason for the bad English?" he asked. He longed
to hear what she would say.

She thought for a minute. "Could it be," she reflected aloud, "that the
person who had the tablet put up associated this place with some one who
was English--maybe a woman, if he was a man--and so he wanted to use her
language, not his own?"

"You have guessed right!" exclaimed Vanno, boyishly delighted with her
intuition. "He was an Italian. He loved an English girl." The romantic
dark eyes which had so often burned with gloomy fire in looking at her
burned with a different flame for an instant; then quickly, as if with a
common impulse, the girl and the man tore their looks apart. "They met
here on the Riviera," Vanno went on, not quite steadily. "It was at this
spot they first found out that they loved each other, according to the
story of my friend."

He paused involuntarily. His mouth was dry. When he began to explain the
tablet, he had not realized what it would be like to tell the story to
this girl at this place. It was as if some other voice, talki