She kept
her hand there, and her hand recognized ugliness vividly. After two or
three minutes she took her hand away, got up and walked to and fro in
the piazza, very near to the balustrade.

Now she was thinking fiercely.

She thought of Fritz. What would he feel when he knew? Shocked for a
moment, no doubt. After all, they had been very close to each other, in
body at least, if not in soul. And the memory of the body would surely
cause him to suffer a little, to think, "I held it often, and now it is
sodden and cold." At least he must think something like that, and his
body must shudder in sympathy with the catastrophe that had overtaken
its old companion. She felt a painful yearning to see Fritz again. Yet
she did not say to herself that she loved him any more. Even before the
accident she had begun to realise that she had not found in Fritz the
face of truth among the crowd of shams which all women seek, ignorantly
or not. And since the accident--there are things that kill even a
woman's love abruptly. And for a dead love there is no resurrection.

Yet to-night she felt infinitely tender over Fritz, as if she stood by
him again and saw the bandage darkened by the red stain.

Then she thought of the song she had sung to Lady Cardington, the song
which had surely opened the eyes of her own drowsy, if not actually
sleeping, heart:

"Tutto al mondo e vano:
Nell'amore ogni dolcezza."

It was horribly true to her to-night. She could imagine now, in her
utter desolation, that for love a woman could easily sacrifice the
world. But she had had the world--all she called the world--ruthlessly
taken from her, and nothing had been given to her to fill its place.
Possibly before the accident she might have recoiled from the idea of
giving up the world for love. But now, as she walked to and fro, it
seemed to her as if a woman isolated from everything with love possessed
the world and all that is therein. Vaguely she remembered the story she
had heard about this very house, Casa Felice. There had been a romance
connected with it. Two lovers had fled here, had lived here for a long
time. She imagined them now, sitting together at night in this piazza,
hearing the waterfall together, looking at the calm lake together,
watching the stars together. The sound of the water was terrible to her.
To them how beautiful it must have been, how beautiful the light of the
stars, and the lonely gardens stretching along the lake,