, inconsistent, a very
chameleon! All my efforts towards unity of purpose are for ever vain. I
must resign myself to my fate. The law of my being is comprised in the
one word--_Nunc_--the will of the Law be done!'

He laughed at himself, and from that moment began a new phase of his
moral degradation.

Without mercy, without remorse, without restraint, he set all his
faculties to work to compass the realisation of his impure imaginings.
To vanquish Maria Ferres he had recourse to the most subtle artifices,
the most delicate machinations; taking care to deceive her in matters of
the soul, of the spiritual, the ideal, the inmost life of the heart. In
carrying on the two campaigns--the conquest of the new and the
re-conquest of the old love--with equal adroitness, and in turning to
the best advantage the chance circumstances of each enterprise, he was
led into an infinity of annoying, embarrassing, and ridiculous
situations, to extricate himself from which he was obliged to descend to
a series of lies and deceptions, of paltry evasions, ignoble subterfuges
and equivocal expedients. All Donna Maria's goodness and faith and
single mindedness were powerless to disarm him. As the foundation of his
work of seduction with her he had taken a verse from one of the
Psalms:--_Asperges me hyssopo et mundabor--lavabis me et super nirem
dealbabor_. And she, poor, hapless, devoted creature, imagined that she
was saving a soul alive, redeeming an intellect, washing away by her own
purity the stains that sin had left on him. She still believed
implicitly in the ever-remembered words he had spoken to her in the
park, on that Epiphany of Love, within sight of the sea; and it was just
in this belief that she found comfort and support in the midst of the
religious conflict that rent her conscience; this belief that blinded
her to all suspicion and filled her with a soil of mystic intoxication
wherein she opened the secret floodgates of her heart and let loose all
her pent-up tenderness, and let the sweetest flowers of her womanhood
blossom out resplendently.

For the first time in his life, Andrea Sperelli found himself face to
face with a _real_ passion--one of those rare and supreme manifestations
of woman's capacity for love which occasionally flash their superb and
terrible lightnings across the shifting gray sky of earthly loves. But
he did not care a jot, and went on with the pitiless work which was to
destroy both himself and his vi