different stories,--her husband had as many,--and every one in the
village had a hundred more. Georgina had been sending money,--she had
managed, apparently, to send a good deal,--and the whole country seemed
to have been living on it and making merry. At one moment the baby
had died and received a most expensive burial; at another he had been
intrusted (for more healthy air, Santissima Madonna!) to the woman's
cousin in another village. According to a version, which for a day or
two Benyon had inclined to think the least false, he had been taken by
the cousin (for his beauty's sake) to Genoa (when she went for the first
time in her life to the town to see her daughter in service there), and
had been confided for a few hours to a third woman, who was to keep him
while the cousin walked about the streets, but who, having no child of
her own, took such a fancy to him that she refused to give him up, and
a few days later left the place (she was a Pisana) never to be heard
of more. The cousin had forgotten her name,--it had happened six months
before. Benyon spent a year looking up and down Italy for his child,
and inspecting hundreds of swaddled infants, impenetrable candidates for
recognition. Of course he could only get further and further from real
knowledge, and his search was arrested by the conviction that it was
making him mad. He set his teeth and made up his mind (or tried to) that
the baby had died in the hands of its nurse. This was, after all, much
the likeliest supposition, and the woman had maintained it, in the hope
of being rewarded for her candor, quite as often as she had asseverated
that it was still, somewhere, alive, in the hope of being remunerated
for her good news. It may be imagined with what sentiments toward his
wife Benyon had emerged from this episode. To-night his memory went
further back,--back to the beginning and to the days when he had had
to ask himself, with all the crudity of his first surprise, what in the
name of wantonness she had wished to do with him. The answer to
this speculation was so old,--it had dropped so ont of the line of
recurrence,--that it was now almost new again. Moreover, it was only
approximate, for, as I have already said, he could comprehend such
conduct as little at the end as at the beginning. She had found herself
on a slope which her nature forced her to descend to the bottom. She did
him the honor of wishing to enjoy his society, and she did herself
the honor