Genoa in twenty minutes, if your time-table is
right. That reminds me, I never posted her letter to the convent, but it
doesn't matter now."

* * * * * * *

Mary lay on her back between the pillows, her hair loose around her
face, a thick plait of it tossed out over the faded green silk quilt.
One arm supported her head, the other was hidden by the bed covering.
The bright light that streamed through the window was an illumination.

Suddenly it was as if an iron hand seized Vanno's heart and slowly
pressed the blood out of it. The thought had flashed into his head that
she was more than ever before like a gentle and lovely Juliet, but
Juliet in the tomb, her white beauty lit by many candles.

If she were dead--if those people had killed her----

Never had Vanno seen any one sleep so soundly. There was no flicker of
the eyelids, no quivering of the nostrils, no rising and falling of the
breast. He laid his hand over her heart, and could not feel it beating,
yet he was not sure that it did not beat very faintly. There were
bounding pulses in his hand as he touched her. He could not tell whether
it was his own blood that throbbed, or whether hers spoke to his,
through living veins.

Very gently he lifted her head, and laying it down again, higher on the
pillow whence it seemed to have slipped, he moved the arm that had
supported it. Then kneeling beside the bed, he kissed her hand again and
again. It was very cold, cold as a lily, he thought, yet not so cold as
a lily killed by the frost.

If some one had come to him at that moment and said, "Mary is dead," he
would have believed that it was the truth, for she looked as if her eyes
had seen the light beyond this world. She was not smiling, yet there was
a radiance on her face which did not seem to be given by the sunset.
Rather did the light appear to come from within. Yet, because no one
said aloud the words that went echoing through his heart, Vanno would
not believe that Mary was dead.

"If I have lost you in this world," he said aloud, as though she could
hear him, "I will follow where you are, to tell you that we belong to
one another through all eternity, and nothing can part us. But you
haven't gone. You could not leave me so."

As he spoke to her, on his knees, her cold hand pressed against his warm
throat, he kept his eyes upon her face, hungrily, watching for some sign
that her spirit heard him from ver