anger against himself for what seemed to him a
poor-spirited fidelity. He was nothing, had never been anything to this
woman who spread devastation through his life. He had always despised
the love that starves on in faithful submission. He would on every
occasion have altered where he alteration found, and bent with the
remover to remove--only he discovered that it was not in his power to do
so. This emotion which had seized him without his volition or consent,
proved stronger than his will. Even though he succeeded in curbing it,
though it lay in chains, as it were, in the profundity of his being--yet
it stirred and threatened at the idea of any other love. It was like a
jealous, ill-governed prisoner who will not share his cell.

This one, supreme flame had burned out in Amaldi all capacity for loving
any other woman.

As the years passed, however, a calmer temper rose in him. Reflecting on
those early days of his love for Sophy, he realised that he had demanded
much while offering little--that he had been unreasonable in expecting
her to love him under the circumstances. Why, indeed, he asked himself
one day, four years after he had parted from her so stormily--why truly
should she have loved him? His whole effort at that time had been to
repress himself. He had never been truly himself when with her, so much
of his will had been absorbed in trying to restrain his passion. He had
been silent, reserved, conventional. Yet he had expected her to return a
feeling, whose depth and intensity she could not possibly have realised.
Now for the second time she was the wife of another man....

No reasoning, no philosophy, no lapse of time could save Amaldi from
crisping in the furnace of this thought.

But when, two years afterwards, his agricultural interests made a
journey to America seem necessary, he faced the probability of meeting
her again with tolerable coolness. He was nearing forty and he
considered life a discipline to be endured with hardihood. His character
had deepened and strengthened.

The Marchesa, in daily contact with him, found a dear companion, though
his habit of long silences seemed to increase with growing years. To his
inmost self she never attained. She did not know whether any chord of
his former passion for Sophy still vibrated. He never alluded to her.

The situation in regard to his wife was just the same. When the Marchesa
looked at her son's fine, sensitive dark face, grown stronger for
co