erent from hers.

Once she had been almost unable to believe that God could choose her to
be the recipient of a supreme happiness. But we accustom ourselves with a
wonderful readiness to a happy fate. She had come back--she had been
allowed to return to the Garden of Paradise. And this fact had given to
her a confidence in life which was almost audacious. So now, even while
she imagined the sorrows of others, half strove to imagine what her own
sorrows might be, her inner feeling was still one of confidence. She
looked out on the shining world, and in her heart was the shining world.
She looked out on the glory of the blue, and in her heart was the glory
of the blue. The world shone for her because she had Maurice. She knew
that. But there was light in it. There would always be light whatever
happened to any human creature. There would always be the sun, the great
symbol of joy. It rose even upon the battle-field where the heaps of the
dead were lying.

She could not realize sorrow to-day. She must see the sunlight even in
the deliberate visions conjured up by her imagination.

Gaspare did not reappear. For a long time she was alone. She watched the
changing of the light, the softening of the great landscape as the
evening approached. Sometimes she thought of Maurice's last words about
being laid to rest some day in the shadows of the oak-trees, in sight of
Etna and the sea. When the years had gone, perhaps they would lie
together in Sicily, wrapped in the final siesta of the body. Perhaps the
unborn child, of whose beginning she was mystically conscious, would lay
them to rest there.

"Buon riposo." She loved the Sicilian good-night. Better than any text
she would love to have those simple words written above her
sleeping-place and his. "Buon riposo!"--she murmured the words to herself
as she looked at the quiet of the hills, at the quiet of the sea. The
glory of the world was inspiring, but the peace of the world was almost
more uplifting, she thought. Far off, in the plain, she discerned tiny
trails of smoke from Sicilian houses among the orange-trees beside the
sea. The gold was fading. The color of the waters was growing paler,
gentler, the color of the sky less passionate. The last point of the
coast-line was only a shadow now, scarcely that. Somewhere was the
sunset, its wonder unseen by her, but realized because of this growing
tenderness, that was like a benediction falling upon her from a distant
love, int