have no aim in view with regard to her! I should like to
see her happy--she has great wealth, and great gifts of intellect and
ability--but these do not make real happiness for a woman. And yet--I
doubt whether she could ever be happy in the ordinary woman's way."

"No, because she is not an 'ordinary' woman," said Rivardi,
quickly--"More's the pity I think--for HER!"

"And for you!" added Aloysius, meaningly.

Rivardi made no answer, and they walked on in silence, the priest
parting with his companion at the gate of the monastery, and the
Marchese going on to his own half-ruined villa lifting its crumbling
walls out of wild verdure and suggesting the historic past, when a
Caesar spent festal hours in its great gardens which were now a
wilderness.

Meanwhile, Morgana, the subject of their mutual thoughts, followed the
path she had taken down to the seashore. Alone there, she stood
absorbed,--a fairylike figure in her shimmering soft robe and the
diamonds flashing in her hair--now looking at the moonlit water,--now
back to the beautiful outline of the Palazzo d'Oro, lifted on its rocky
height and surrounded by a paradise of flowers and foliage--then to the
long wide structure of the huge shed where her wonderful air-ship lay,
as it were, in harbour. She stretched out her arms with a fatigued,
appealing gesture.

"I have all I want!"--she said softly aloud,--"All!--all that money can
buy--more than money has ever bought!--and yet--the unknown quantity
called happiness is not in the bargain. What is it? Why is it? I am
like the princess in the 'Arabian Nights' who was quite satisfied with
her beautiful palace till an old woman came along and told her that it
wanted a roc's egg to make it perfect. And she became at once miserable
and discontented because she had not the roc's egg! I thought her a
fool when I read that story in my childhood--but I am as great a fool
as she to-day. I want that roc's egg!"

She laughed to herself and looked up at the splendid moon, round as a
golden shield in heaven.

"How the moon shone that night in California!" she murmured--"And Roger
Seaton--bear-man as he is--would have given worlds to hold me in his
arms and kiss me as he did once when he 'didn't mean it!' Ah! I wonder
if he ever WILL mean it! Perhaps--when it is too late!"

And there swept over her mind the memory of Manella--her rich, warm,
dark beauty--her frank abandonment to passions purely primitive,--and
she smiled, a