Wogan? What of me?" and she leaned back in
her carriage and drove away. Wogan had no answer to that despairing
question. He stood with his head bared till the carriage passed round a
corner and disappeared, but the voice rang for a long while in his ears.
And for a long while the dark eyes abrim with tears, and the tortured
face, kept him company at nights. He walked slowly back to his lodging,
and mounting a horse rode out of Bologna, and towards the Apennines.

On one of the lower slopes he came upon a villa just beyond a curve of
the road, and reined in his horse. The villa nestled on the hillside
below him in a terraced garden of oleander and magnolias, very pretty to
the eye. Cypress hedges enclosed it; the spring had made it a bower of
rose blossoms, and depths of shade out of whose green darkness glowed
here and there a red statue like a tutelary god. Wogan dismounted and
led his horse down the path to the door. He inquired for Lady
Featherstone, and was shown into a room from the windows of which he
looked down on Bologna, that city of colonnades. Lady Featherstone,
however, had heard the tramp of his horse; she came running up from the
garden, and without waiting to hear any particulars of her visitor,
burst eagerly into the room.

"Well?" she said, and stopped and swayed upon the threshold. Wogan
turned from the window towards her.

"Your Ladyship was wise, I think, to leave Bologna. The little house in
the trees there had no such wide prospect as this."

He spoke rather to give her time than out of any sarcasm. She set a
hand against the jamb of the door, and even so barely sustained her
trifling weight. Her knees shook, her childlike face grew white as
paper, a great terror glittered in her eyes.

"I am not the visitor whom you expect," continued Wogan, "nor do I bring
the news which you would wish to hear;" and at that she raised a
trembling hand. "I beg you--a moment's silence. Then I will hear you,
Mr. Warner." She made a sort of stumbling run and reached a couch. Wogan
shut the door and waited. He was glad that she had used the name of
Warner. It recalled to him that evening at Ohlau when she had stood
behind the curtain with a stiletto in her hand, and the three last days
of his perilous ride to Schlestadt. He needed his most vivid
recollections to steel his heart against her; for he was beginning to
think it was his weary lot to go up and down the world causing pain to
women. After a while she sa