ake it more
difficult for me!"

"But I don't understand--"

"Don't you see that she might find it impossible to forgive him? She
has suffered so much! And I can't risk that--for in her anger she might
speak. And even if she forgave him, she might be tempted to show the
letter. Don't you see that, even now, a word of this might ruin him? I
will trust his fate to no one. If Italy needed him then she needs him
far more to-day."

She stood before me magnificently, in the splendor of her great
refusal; then she turned to the writing-table at which she had been
seated when I came in. Her sealing-taper was still alight, and she held
her brother's letter to the flame.

I watched her in silence while it burned; but one more question rose to
my lips.

"You will tell _him_, then, what you have done for him?" I cried.

And at that the heroine turned woman, melted and pressed unhappy hands
in mine.

"Don't you see that I can never tell him what I do for him? That is my
gift to Italy," she said.

THE DILETTANTE

IT was on an impulse hardly needing the arguments he found himself
advancing in its favor, that Thursdale, on his way to the club, turned
as usual into Mrs. Vervain's street.

The "as usual" was his own qualification of the act; a convenient way
of bridging the interval--in days and other sequences--that lay between
this visit and the last. It was characteristic of him that he
instinctively excluded his call two days earlier, with Ruth Gaynor,
from the list of his visits to Mrs. Vervain: the special conditions
attending it had made it no more like a visit to Mrs. Vervain than an
engraved dinner invitation is like a personal letter. Yet it was to
talk over his call with Miss Gaynor that he was now returning to the
scene of that episode; and it was because Mrs. Vervain could be trusted
to handle the talking over as skilfully as the interview itself that,
at her corner, he had felt the dilettante's irresistible craving to
take a last look at a work of art that was passing out of his
possession.

On the whole, he knew no one better fitted to deal with the unexpected
than Mrs. Vervain. She excelled in the rare art of taking things for
granted, and Thursdale felt a pardonable pride in the thought that she
owed her excellence to his training. Early in his career Thursdale had
made the mistake, at the outset of his acquaintance with a lady, of
telling her that he loved her and exacting the same avowal in retur