of the palace, devoured by impatience
and curiosity. The novelty of the situation, the spectacle of the snowy
night, the mystery and uncertainty of it all, inflamed his imagination
and transported him beyond the realities of life.

Over Rome, on that memorable February night, there shone a full moon of
fabulous size and unheard of splendour. In that immense radiance, the
surrounding objects seemed to exist only as in a dream, impalpable,
meteoric, and visible at a great distance by virtue of some fantastic
irradiation of their own. The snow covered the railings of the gateway,
concealing the iron and transforming it into a piece of open-work, more
frail and airy than filigree; while the white-robed Colossi supported it
as oaks support a spider's web. The garden looked like a motionless
forest of enormous and mis-shapen lilies all of ice; a garden under some
lunar enchantment, a lifeless paradise of Selene. Mute, solemn and
massive the Palazzo Barberini reared its great bulk into the sky, its
most salient points standing out dazzlingly white and casting a pale
blue shadow as transparent as light.

He waited, leaning forward on the watch; and under the fascination of
that marvellous spectacle, he felt the spirits that wait on love awake
in him, that the lyric summits of his sentiment began to gleam and
glitter like the frozen shafts of the gateway under the moon. But he
could not make up his mind which of the two women he would prefer as the
centre of this fantastic scenery: Elena Heathfield robed in imperial
purple, or Maria Ferres robed in ermine. And as he lingered pleasurably
over this uncertainty of choice, he ended by mingling and confounding
his two anxieties--the real one for Elena and the imaginary one for
Maria.

A clock near by struck in the silence with a clear vibrating sound, and
each stroke seemed to break something crystalline in the air. The clock
of the Trinita de' Monti responded to the call, and after that the clock
of the Quirinal--then others faintly out of the distance. It was a
quarter past eleven.

Andrea strained his eyes towards the portico. Would she dare to traverse
the garden on foot? He pictured the figure of Elena in the midst of all
this dazzling whiteness, then, in an instant, that of Donna Maria
appeared to him, obliterating the other, triumphant over the whiteness,
_Candida super nivem_. This night of moonlight and snow then was under
the dominance of Maria Ferres as under some invi