fort. Her grey eyes,
which Amaldi remembered so brilliantly eager, had that subdued, waiting
look which comes from either physical or mental suffering constantly
endured. Which of these causes brought that look into her eyes, he felt
that he must know. He could not bear it that her eyes should have that
look in them. What was wrong? Was it her health or was it that a second
time she had made the mistake most terrible of all to a woman such as
she was? In that case....

Amaldi faced himself squarely. There was no escaping the truth of what
he had brought upon himself by his own act. It had needed but that one
sight of her, that one touch of her hand to rouse in him the old love,
as much stronger for the lapse of years as was his manhood. And now ...
what? There was no danger of his repeating his mistake of six years ago.
A great love always, sooner or later, brings humility--the proud
humility expressed in the fine old Latin phrase of the Romish
ritual--"whom to serve is to be a King." To serve her in her need,
Amaldi felt, would confer kinghood of spirit.

"If she is unhappy ... if love has failed her this second time ... if
she has no love left to give me ... even in years to come ... why, then,
at least I can be her friend...." thought Amaldi.

He had reached this "Station" in the Via Crucis of love. He looked back,
wondering, on the man he had been as contrasted with the man he now was.
Had any one told him at thirty that he would some day feel towards a
woman as he now felt towards Sophy, he would have smiled. Yet, within a
decade he had come to know by experience that the intense, sublimated
passion of the _Vita Nuova_ is no exaggeration.

Those who maintain that Beatrice was for Dante merely a symbol of Divine
and Abstract love, cannot realise the miraculous power of metamorphosis
inherent in a supreme, human love withheld from its natural expression.

Love of this kind is clairvoyant and clairaudient. Though he could not
yet discern causes clearly, Amaldi could both see and hear the shadowy
presences that followed Sophy in those days. The one stared with the
eyes of a virgin at her broken cestus, the other plained softly: "Vanity
of vanities ... all is vanity." Why this was, he did not know, but that
it was, he knew certainly. He set himself to watch, with the
watchfulness of the "_Loyal serviteur._"

Within the next day or two he called about tea-time as Sophy had asked
him to. He found her having tea on t