alendar.
Perhaps, if the truth were known, she was more abased in her own eyes by
the self-abandonment which had preceded the assignation with Warkworth.
She had much intellectual arrogance, and before her acquaintance with
Warkworth she had been accustomed to say and to feel that love was but
one passion among many, and to despise those who gave it too great a
place. And here she had flung herself into it, like any dull or foolish
girl for whom a love affair represents the only stirring in the pool of
life that she is ever likely to know.

Well, she must recapture herself and remake her life. As she sat there
in the still Italian evening she thought of the old boatman, and those
social and intellectual passions to which his burst of patriotism had
recalled her thoughts. Society, literature, friends, and the ambitions
to which these lead--let her go back to them and build her days afresh.
Dr. Meredith was coming. In his talk and companionship she would once
more dip and temper the tools of mind and taste. No more vain
self-arraignment, no more useless regrets. She looked back with
bitterness upon a moment of weakness when, in the first stage of
convalescence, in mortal weariness and loneliness, she had slipped one
evening into the Farm Street church and unburdened her heart in
confession. As she had told the Duchess, the Catholicism instilled into
her youth by the Bruges nuns still laid upon her at times its ghostly
and compelling hand. Now in her renewed strength she was inclined to
look upon it as an element of weakness and disintegration in her nature.
She resolved, in future, to free herself more entirely from a useless
_Aberglaube_.

But Meredith was not the only visitor expected at the villa in the next
few days. She was already schooling herself to face the arrival of Jacob
Delafield.

It was curious how the mere thought of Delafield produced an agitation,
a shock of feeling, which seemed to spread through all the activities of
being. The faint, renascent glamour which had begun to attach to
literature and social life disappeared. She fell into a kind of
brooding, the sombre restlessness of one who feels in the dark the
recurrent presence of an attacking and pursuing power, and is in a
tremulous uncertainty where or how to meet it.

The obscure tumult within her represented, in fact, a collision between
the pagan and Christian conceptions of life. In self-dependence, in
personal pride, in her desire to refer