not imagine that in the rush of commerce and the marvels of science the
world is left empty of love! Love is still the strongest force in
nature!"

Morgana's eyes flashed up, then drooped under their white lids fringed
with gold.

"You think so?" she murmured--"To me, love leads nowhere!"

"Except to Heaven!" said Aloysius.

There followed a silence.

It was broken by the entrance of a servant announcing that coffee was
served in the loggia. They left the dinner-table and went out into the
wonder of a perfect Sicilian moonlight. All the gardens were illumined
and the sea beyond, with wide strands of silver spreading on all sides,
falling over the marble pavements and steps of the loggia and
glistening on certain white flowering shrubs with the smooth sheen of
polished pearl. The magical loveliness of the scene, made lovelier by
the intense silence of the hour, held them as with a binding spell, and
Morgana, standing by one of the slender columns which not only
supported the loggia but the whole Palazzo d'Oro as with the petrified
stems of trees, made a figure completely in harmony with her
surroundings.

"Could anything be more enchantingly beautiful!" sighed Lady
Kingswood--"One ought to thank God for eyes to see it!"

"And many people with eyes would not see it at all,"--said Don
Aloysius--"They would go indoors, shut the shutters and play Bridge!
But those who can see it are the happiest!"

And he quoted--

"'On such a night as this,
When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees
And they did make no noise,--on such a night
Troilus, methinks, mounted the Trojan walls
And sighed his soul towards the Grecian tents
Where Cressid lay!'"

"You know your Shakespeare!" said Rivardi.

"Who would not know him!" replied Aloysius--"One is not blind to the
sun!"

"Ah, poor Shakespeare!" said Morgana--"What a lesson he gives us
miserable little moderns in the worth of fame! So great, so
unapproachable,--and yet!--doubted and slandered and reviled three
hundred years after his death by envious detractors who cannot write a
line!"

"But what does that matter?" returned Aloysius. "Envy and detraction in
their blackness only emphasise his brightness, just as a star shines
more brilliantly in a dark sky. One always recognises a great spirit by
the littleness of those who strive to wound it,--if it were not great
it would not be worth wounding!"

"Shakespeare might have imag