shall
be; does it make the loss of my hopes any easier to bear when you tell
me that I shall think differently in time? You might as well try to make
a man with a broken leg forget his pain by telling him that in a hundred
years' time he will be dead and buried!"

The tears stood in her eyes. She seemed startled by the intense energy
with which he spoke; her next words scarcely rose above a whisper.
"Percival," she said, "I don't like to see you suffer."

"Then I will leave you," he said, sternly. "For, if I stay, I can't
pretend that I do not feel the pain of losing you."

He turned away, but before he had gone two steps a hand was placed upon
his arm.

"I can't let you go in this way," she said. "Oh, Percival, you have
always been good to me till now. I can't begin a new life by giving you
pain. Don't you understand what I want to say?"

He put his hand on her shoulder and looked into her face. The deep
colour flushed his own, but hers was white as snow, and she was
trembling like a leaf.

"Do you love me, Elizabeth?" he said.

"I don't know," she answered, simply, "but I will marry you, Percival,
if you like."

"That is not enough. Do you love me?"

"Too well," she answered, "to let you go."

And so he stayed.

CHAPTER XIII.

SAN STEFANO.

When the vines were stripped of their clusters, and the ploughed fields
stood bare and brown in the autumnal sun--when the fig trees lost their
leaves, and their white branches took on that peculiarly gaunt
appearance which characterises them as soon as the wintry winds begin to
blow--a solitary traveller plodded wearily across the Lombardy plains,
asking, as he went, for the road that would lead him to the village and
monastery of San Stefano.

He arrived at his destination on an evening late in November. It was
between five and six o'clock when he came to the little, white village,
nestling in a cleft of the hills, with the monastery on a slope behind
it. There was a background of mountainous country--green, and grey, and
purple--with solemn, white heights behind, stretching far into the
crystal clearness of the sky. As the traveller reached the village he
looked up to those white forms, and saw them transfigured in the evening
light. The sky behind them changed to rose colour, to purple, violet,
even to delicate pale green and golden, and, when the daylight had
faded, an afterglow tinged the snowy summit with a roseate flush more
tenderly ethereal tha