ening towards the steps, she ran
down five or six and then stopped, dazed and panting. Through the
silence, she heard the beating of her heart like the roll of distant
thunder. The Villa Medici was no longer in sight; the stairway was
enclosed between two walls, damp and gray and with grass growing in the
cracks, gloomy as a subterranean dungeon. She saw Andrea lean down
swiftly to kiss her on the lips.

'No, no, Andrea--no!'

He stretched out his hands to draw her to him, to hold her fast.

'No!'

Wildly she seized one of his hands and carried it to her lips; she
kissed it twice--thrice, with frenzied passion. Then she fled down the
steps to the gate like a mad creature.

'Maria! Maria! Stop!'

They stood together before the closed gate, pale, panting, shaken,
trembling from head to foot, gazing at one another with wide distraught
eyes, their ears filled with the throb of their mad pulses, a sense of
choking in their throats. Then suddenly, with one impulse, they were in
each other's arms, heart to heart, lips to lips.

'Enough--you are killing me,' she murmured, leaning, half fainting,
against the gateway, with a gesture of supreme entreaty.

For a moment, they stood facing one another without touching. All the
silence of the Villa seemed to weigh upon them in this narrow spot
enclosed in its high walls like an open tomb. High above them sounded
the hoarse cawing of the rooks gathering on the roofs of the palaces or
crossing the sky. Once more, a strange fear possessed Maria's heart. She
cast a terror-stricken glance up at the top of the walls. Then, with a
visible effort she said quickly:

'We can go now; will you open the gate!'

And, in her uncontrollable haste to get away, her hand met Andrea's on
the latch of the gate.

As she passed between the two granite columns and under the jasmin,
Andrea said--'Look, the jasmin is just going to blossom!'

She did not turn but she smiled--a smile that was infinitely sad because
of the shadow cast upon her heart by the sudden recollection of the name
she had read in the Belvedere. And while she walked through the
mysterious gloom of the avenue, and she felt his kiss flame in her
blood, a ruthless torture graved deep into her heart, that name--oh,
that name!

CHAPTER VI

Lord Heathfield opened the great book-case containing his private
collection, and turning to Sperelli--

'You should design the clasps for this volume,' he said; 'it is in
quarto a