ife of the great city sent up
its breath into the keen air, bells were ringing far and near. At last,
he had the full consciousness of his overwhelming felicity.

CHAPTER VI

Thus began for them a bliss that was full, frenzied, for ever changing
and for ever new; a passion that wrapped them round and rendered them
oblivious of all that did not minister immediately to their mutual
delight.

'What a strange love!' Elena said once, recalling those first days--her
illness, her rapid surrender--'My heart was yours from the first moment
I saw you.'

She felt a certain pride in the fact.

'And when, on that evening, I heard my name announced immediately after
yours,' her lover replied, 'I don't know why, but I suddenly had the
firm conviction that my life was bound to yours--for ever!'

And they really believed what they said. Together they re-read Goethe's
Roman elegy--_Lass dich, Geliebte, nicht reu'n, dass du mir so schnell
dich ergeben!_--Have no regrets, my Beloved, that thou didst yield thee
so soon--'Believe me, dearest, I do not attribute one base or impure
thought to you. Cupid's darts have varying effects--some inflict but a
slight scratch, and the poison they insinuate lingers for years before
it really touches the heart, while others, well feathered and armed with
a sharp and penetrating point, pierce to the heart's core at once and
send the fever racing through the blood. In the old heroic days of the
loves of the gods and goddesses desire followed upon sight. Think you
that the goddess of Love considered long in the grove of Ida that day
Anchises found favour in her eyes? And Luna?--had she hesitated, envious
Aurora would soon have wakened her handsome shepherd.'

For them, as for Faustina's divine singer, Rome was illumined by a new
light. Wherever their footsteps strayed they left a memory of love. The
forgotten churches of the Aventine--Santa Sabina with its wonderful
columns of Parian marble, the charming garden of Santa Maria del
Priorata, the campanile of Santa Maria in Cosmedin piercing the azure
with its slender rose-coloured spire grew to know them well. The villas
of the cardinals and the princes--the Villa Pamfili mirrored in its
fountains and its lakes, all sweetness and grace, where every shady
grove seems to harbour some noble idyll; the Villa Albani, cold and
silent as a church, with its avenues of sculptured marble and
centenarian trees; where in the vestibules, under the porticos