her questions at all cost. He was neither capable of consoling her nor
of practising fresh deceptions.

'Hush!' he whispered in a choking, almost irrecognisable voice.

Crouching at her feet, he laid his head in her lap and remained like
that for a long time without speaking, while she laid her tender hands
upon his temples and felt the wild, irregular beating of his arteries.
She realised that he was suffering fiercely, and in his pain forgot all
thought of her own, grieving now only for his grief--only for him.

Presently he rose, and clasped her with such mad vehemence to him that
she was frightened.

'What has come to you! What is it?' she cried, trying to look in his
eyes, to discover the reason of his sudden frenzy. But he only buried
his face deeper in her bosom, her neck, her hair--anywhere out of sight.

All at once, she struggled free of his embrace, her whole form convulsed
with horror, her face ghastly and distraught as if she had at that
moment torn herself from the arms of Death.

That name! That name!--She had heard that name!

A deep and awful silence fell upon her soul, and in it there suddenly
opened one of those great gulfs into which the whole universe seems to
be hurled at the touch of one thought. She heard nothing more. Andrea
might writhe and supplicate and despair as he would--in vain.

She heard nothing. Some instinct directed her actions. She found her
things and put them on.

Andrea lay upon the floor, sobbing, frenzied, mad.

He was conscious that she was preparing to leave the room.

'Maria! Maria!

He listened.

'Maria!'

He only heard the sound of the door closing behind her--she was gone.

CHAPTER X

At ten o'clock in the morning of June 20th the sale began of the
furniture and hangings belonging to His Excellency the Minister
Plenipotentiary for Guatemala.

It was a burning hot morning. Summer blazed already over Rome. Up and
down the Via Nationale ran the tram-cars, drawn by horses with funny
white caps over their heads to protect them against the sun. Long lines
of heavily-laden carts encumbered the road, while the blare of trumpets
mingled with the cracking of whips and the hoarse cries of the carters.

Andrea could not make up his mind to cross the threshold of that house,
but wandered about the street a long time, weighed down by a horrible
sense of lassitude, a lassitude so overwhelming and desperate as to be
almost a physical longing for death.

A