ntly, till the winter was over
and the spring came to bring to Italy its radiance once more.

Even the spring was not an idyll. Rupert Carey had struggled upward,
but Viola, too, had much to forget and very much to learn. The egoist,
spoken of by Carey himself one night in Half Moon Street, was slow to
fade in the growing radiance that played about the angel's feet. But
it knew, and Carey knew also, that it was no longer fine enough in
its brilliant selfishness to stand quite alone. With the death of the
physical beauty there came a modesty of heart. With the understanding,
bitter and terrible as it was, that the great, conquering outward thing
was destroyed, came the desire, the imperious need, to find and to
develop if possible the inner things which, perhaps, conquer less
easily, but which retain their conquests to the end. There was growth in
Casa Felice, slow but stubborn, growth in the secret places of the soul,
till there came a time when not merely the white angel, but the whole
woman, angel and that which had perhaps been devil too, was able to
accept the yoke laid upon her with patience, was able to say, "I can
endure it bravely."

Lord Holme presently took his case to the Courts. It was undefended and
he won it. Not long ago Viola Holme became Viola Carey.

When Robin Pierce heard of it in Rome he sat for a long time in deep
thought. Even now, even after all that had passed, he felt a thrill of
pain that was like the pain of jealousy. He wished for the impossible,
he wished that he had been born with his friend's nature; that, instead
of the man who could only talk of being, he were the man who could be.
And yet, in the past, he had sometimes surely defended Viola against
Carey's seeming condemnation! He had defended and not loved--but Carey
had judged and loved.

Carey had judged and loved, yet Carey had said he did not believe in a
God. Robin wondered if he believed now.

Robin was in Rome, and could not hear the words of a man and a woman who
were sitting one night, after the marriage, upon a piazza above the Lake
of Como.

The man said:

"Do you remember Robin's '_Danseuse de Tunisie_'?"

"The woman with the fan?"

"Yes. I see her now without the fan. With it she was a siren, perhaps,
but without it she is--"

"What is she without it?"

"Eternal woman. Ah, how much better than the siren!"

There was a silence filled only by the voice of the waterfall between
the cypresses. Then the woman s