mouth, all the anger gone out of
him, feeling ashamed, and an utter fool. He was fairly and rightfully
cornered. When had a husband so given himself away before? She finished;
and he was dumb, for she had spoken truly. Then, alas! the absurdity of
his own position grew upon him, and he laughed--as he would have laughed
at the same situation on the stage.

"You laugh?" stammered Lilia.

"Ah!" he cried, "who could help it? I, who thought you knew and saw
nothing--I am tricked--I am conquered. I give in. Let us talk of it no
more."

He touched her on the shoulder like a good comrade, half amused and half
penitent, and then, murmuring and smiling to himself, ran quietly out of
the room.

Perfetta burst into congratulations. "What courage you have!" she cried;
"and what good fortune! He is angry no longer! He has forgiven you!"

Neither Perfetta, nor Gino, nor Lilia herself knew the true reason of
all the misery that followed. To the end he thought that kindness and a
little attention would be enough to set things straight. His wife was
a very ordinary woman, and why should her ideas differ from his own?
No one realized that more than personalities were engaged; that the
struggle was national; that generations of ancestors, good, bad, or
indifferent, forbad the Latin man to be chivalrous to the northern
woman, the northern woman to forgive the Latin man. All this might have
been foreseen: Mrs. Herriton foresaw it from the first.

Meanwhile Lilia prided herself on her high personal standard, and Gino
simply wondered why she did not come round. He hated discomfort and
yearned for sympathy, but shrank from mentioning his difficulties in the
town in case they were put down to his own incompetence. Spiridione was
told, and replied in a philosophical but not very helpful letter. His
other great friend, whom he trusted more, was still serving in Eritrea
or some other desolate outpost. And, besides, what was the good of
letters? Friends cannot travel through the post.

Lilia, so similar to her husband in many ways, yearned for comfort and
sympathy too. The night he laughed at her she wildly took up paper and
pen and wrote page after page, analysing his character, enumerating his
iniquities, reporting whole conversations, tracing all the causes and
the growth of her misery. She was beside herself with passion,
and though she could hardly think or see, she suddenly attained to
magnificence and pathos which a practised stylist