nely strung as to
make all other women seem gross and material beside her. He felt and
knew her to be both his moral and intellectual superior,--and this very
fact rendered it impossible that he could ever master her mind and tame
it down to the subservience of married life. That dauntless spirit of
hers would never bend to an inferior,--not even love (if she could feel
it) would move her thus far. And the man she had adventured across
ocean to rescue--what was he? She confessed that she had loved him,
though that love was past. And now she had set herself to watch night
and day by his dead body (for dead he surely was in Rivardi's opinion)
sparing no pains to recover what seemed beyond recovery; while one of
the greatest mysteries of the whole mysterious affair was just
this--How had she known the man's life was in danger?

All these questions Rivardi discussed with Don Aloysius, who listened
to him patiently without committing himself to any reply. Whatever
Morgana had confided to him--(and she had confided much)--he kept his
own counsel.

Within forty-eight hours of Morgana's summons the famous specialist
from Rome, Professor Marco Ardini, noted all over the world for his
miraculous cures of those whom other physicians had given up as past
curing, arrived. He heard the story of the rescue of a man and woman
from drowning with emotionless gravity, more taken for the moment by
Morgana herself, whom he had never seen before, but with whom he had
corresponded on current questions of scientific importance. From the
extremely learned and incisive tone of her letters he had judged her to
be an elderly woman of profound scholarship who had spent the greater
part of her life in study, and his astonishment at the sight of the
small, dainty creature who received him in the library of the Palazzo
d'Oro was beyond all verbal expression,--in fact, he took some minutes
to recover from the magnetic "shock" of her blue eyes and wistful smile.

"I must be quite frank with you,"--she said, after a preliminary
conversation with the great man in his own Italian tongue--"These two
people have suffered their injuries by drowning--but not altogether.
They are the victims of an earthquake,--and were thrown by the earth's
upheaval into a deep chasm flooded by water--"

The Professor interrupted her.

"Pardon, Signora! There has been no recent earthquake in Europe."

She gave a little gesture of assent.

"Not in Europe--no! But in Amer