de him grew ever denser.

At night they made no effort to move him from the couch and the
half-sitting posture in which he had passed the day. Death had come too
near. His sister and Aldous and the young doctor who had brought him
from London watched with him. The curtains were drawn back from both the
windows, and in the clearness of the first autumnal frost a crescent
moon hung above the woods, the silvery lawns, the plain.

Not long after midnight Hallin seemed to himself to wake, full of
purpose and of strength. He spoke, as he thought, to Aldous, asking to
be alone with him. But Aldous did not move; that sad watching gaze of
his showed no change. Then Hallin suffered a sudden sharp spasm of
anguish and of struggle. Three words to say--only three words; but those
he _must_ say! He tried again, but Aldous's dumb grief still sat
motionless. Then the thought leapt in the ebbing sense, "Speech is gone;
I shall speak no more!"

It brought with it a stab, a quick revolt. But something checked both,
and in a final offering of the soul, Hallin gave up his last desire.

What Aldous saw was only that the dying man opened his hand as though it
asked for that of his friend. He placed his own within those seeking
fingers, and Hallin's latest movement--which death stopped half-way--was
to raise it to his lips.

* * * * *

So Marcella's confession--made in the abandonment, the blind passionate
trust, of a supreme moment--bore no fruit. It went with Hallin to the
grave.

CHAPTER III.

"I think I saw the letters arrive," said Mrs. Boyce to her daughter.
"And Donna Margherita seems to be signalling to us."

"Let me go for them, mamma."

"No, thank you, I must go in."

And Mrs. Boyce rose from her seat, and went slowly towards the hotel.
Marcella watched her widow's cap and black dress as they passed along
the _pergola_ of the hotel garden, between bright masses of geraniums
and roses on either side.

They had been sitting in the famous garden of the Cappucini Hotel at
Amalfi. To Marcella's left, far below the high terrace of the hotel, the
green and azure of the Salernian gulf shone and danced in the sun, to
her right a wood of oak and arbutus stretched up into a purple cliff--a
wood starred above with gold and scarlet berries, and below with
cyclamen and narcissus. From the earth under the leafy oaks--for the
oaks at Amalfi lose and regain their foliage in winter and spring by
i