ping him to recover;
vain hope as it may be, there is a divine unselfishness in it. For she
says that if he is restored to health she will go away at once and
never let him know she is his wife."

Rivardi's handsome face expressed utter incredulity.

"Will she keep her word I wonder?"

"She will!"

"Marvellous woman!" and there was bitterness in his tone--"But women
are all amazing when you come to know them! In love? in hate, in good,
in evil, in cleverness and in utter stupidity, they are wonderful
creatures! And you, amica bella, are perhaps the most wonderful of them
all! So kind and yet so cruel!"

"Cruel?" she echoed.

"Yes! To me!"

She looked at him and smiled. That smile gave such a dreamy, spiritlike
sweetness to her whole personality that for the moment she seemed to
float before him like an aerial vision rather than a woman of flesh and
blood, and the bold desire which possessed him to seize and clasp her
in his arms was checked by a sense of something like fear. Her eyes
rested on his with a full clear frankness.

"If I am cruel to you, my friend"--she said, gently, "it is only to be
more kind!"

She left him then and went out. He saw her small, elfin figure pass
among the chains of roses which at this season seemed to tie up the
garden in brilliant knots of colour, and then go down the terraces, one
by one, towards the monastic retreat half buried among pine and olive,
where Don Aloysius governed his little group of religious brethren.

He guessed her intent.

"She will tell him all"--he thought--"And with his strange
semi-religious, semi-scientific notions, it will be easy for her to
persuade him to marry the girl to this demented creature who fills the
house with his shouting 'There shall be no more wars!' I should never
have thought her capable of tolerating such a crime!"

He turned to leave the loggia,--but paused as he perceived Professor
Ardini advancing from the interior of the house, his hands clasped
behind his back and his furrowed brows bent in gloomy meditation.

"You have a difficult case?" he queried.

"More than difficult!" replied Ardini--"Beyond human skill! Perhaps not
beyond the mysterious power we call God."

Rivardi shrugged his shoulders. He was a sceptic of sceptics and his
modern-world experiences had convinced him that what man could not do
was not to be done at all.

"The latest remedy proposed by the Signora is--love!" he said,
carelessly--"The girl who is