o quiet as to be almost
expressionless, and that the soft intonation of his speech was almost
too monotonous to be natural. But all this was just what his wife
admired, and she encouraged her son to imitate it. His father had been a
man of quick impulses, weak to-day, strong to-morrow, restless, of
uncertain temper, easily enthusiastic and easily cast down, capable of
sudden emotions, and never able to conceal what he felt if he had cared
to do so. Marcello had inherited his father's character and his mother's
face, as often happens; but his unquiet disposition was tempered as yet
by a certain almost girlish docility, which had clung to him from
childhood as the result of being brought up almost entirely by the
mother he worshipped. And now, for the first time, comparing him with
her second husband, she realised the boy's girlishness, and wished him
to outgrow it. Her own ideal of what even a young man should be was as
unpractical as that of many thoroughly good and thoroughly unworldly
mothers. She wished her son to be a man at all points, and yet she
dreamed that he might remain a sort of glorified young girl; she desired
him to be well prepared to face the world when he grew up, and yet it
was her dearest wish that he might never know anything of the world's
wickedness. Corbario seemed to understand her better in this than she
understood herself, and devoted his excellent gifts and his almost
superhuman patience to the task of forming a modern Galahad. Her
confidence in her husband increased month by month, and year by year.

"I wish to make a new will," she said to her lawyer in the third year of
her marriage. "I shall leave my husband a life-interest in a part of my
fortune, and the reversion of the whole in case anything should happen
to my son."

The lawyer was a middle-aged man, with hard black eyes. While he was
listening to a client, he had a habit of folding his arms tightly across
his chest and crossing one leg over the other. When the Signora Corbario
had finished speaking he sat quite still for a moment, and then
noiselessly reversed the crossing of his legs and the folding of his
arms, and looked into her face. It was very gentle, fair, and
thoughtful.

"I presume," answered the lawyer, "that the clause providing for a
reversion is only intended as an expression of your confidence in your
husband?"

"Affection," answered the Signora, "includes confidence."

The lawyer raised one eyebrow almost imper