a of
qualifying for a mining engineer. But this scientific aspect of his
labours remained vague and imperfect in his mind. Mines had acquired for
him a dramatic interest. He studied their peculiarities from a personal
point of view, too, as one would study the varied characters of men. He
visited them as one goes with curiosity to call upon remarkable persons.
He visited mines in Germany, in Spain, in Cornwall. Abandoned workings
had for him strong fascination. Their desolation appealed to him like
the sight of human misery, whose causes are varied and profound. They
might have been worthless, but also they might have been misunderstood.
His future wife was the first, and perhaps the only person to detect
this secret mood which governed the profoundly sensible, almost
voiceless attitude of this man towards the world of material things. And
at once her delight in him, lingering with half-open wings like those
birds that cannot rise easily from a flat level, found a pinnacle from
which to soar up into the skies.

They had become acquainted in Italy, where the future Mrs. Gould was
staying with an old and pale aunt who, years before, had married a
middle-aged, impoverished Italian marquis. She now mourned that man, who
had known how to give up his life to the independence and unity of his
country, who had known how to be as enthusiastic in his generosity as
the youngest of those who fell for that very cause of which old Giorgio
Viola was a drifting relic, as a broken spar is suffered to float away
disregarded after a naval victory. The Marchesa led a still, whispering
existence, nun-like in her black robes and a white band over the
forehead, in a corner of the first floor of an ancient and ruinous
palace, whose big, empty halls downstairs sheltered under their painted
ceilings the harvests, the fowls, and even the cattle, together with the
whole family of the tenant farmer.

The two young people had met in Lucca. After that meeting Charles Gould
visited no mines, though they went together in a carriage, once, to see
some marble quarries, where the work resembled mining in so far that
it also was the tearing of the raw material of treasure from the earth.
Charles Gould did not open his heart to her in any set speeches. He
simply went on acting and thinking in her sight. This is the true method
of sincerity. One of his frequent remarks was, "I think sometimes that
poor father takes a wrong view of that San Tome business." A