not lurk behind every wall to spring upon the defenceless
foreigner.

The tourists were of the usual class, and Cecilia was annoyed to find
them where she had hoped to be alone; but they would soon go away, and
she sat down with Petersen to wait for their going, under the shadow of
the temple of Castor and Pollux. Petersen began to read her guide-book,
and the young girl fell to thinking while she pushed a little stone from
side to side with the point of her parasol, trying to bring it each time
to the exact spot on which it had lain before.

She was thinking of all that had happened to her since she left Petersen
in that same place on the May morning that seemed left behind in another
existence, and she was wondering whether she would go back to that
point, if she could, and live the months over again; or whether, if the
return were possible, she would have made the rest different from what
it had been.

It would have been so much easier to go on loving the man in the dream
to the end of her life, meeting him again and again in the old
surroundings that were more familiar to her than those in which she
lived. It would have been so much better to be always her fancied self,
to be the faithful Vestal, leading the man she loved by sure degrees to
heights of immaterial blessedness in that cool outer firmament where
sight and hearing and feeling, and thinking and loving, were all merged
in a universal consciousness. It would have been so much easier not to
love a real man, above all not to love one who never could love her,
come what might. And besides, if all that had gone on, she would never
have brought disappointment and suffering upon Guido d'Este.

She decided that it would have been preferable, by far, to have gone on
with her life of dreams, and when awake to have been as she had always
known herself, in love with everything that made her think and with
nothing that made her feel.

But in the very moment when the matter seemed decided, she remembered
how she had looked into Lamberti's eyes three nights ago, and had felt
something more delicious than all thinking while she told him how she
loved that other man, who was himself. That one moment had seemed worth
an age of dreams and a lifetime of visions, and for it she knew that she
would give them all, again and again.

The point of the parasol did not move now, but lay against the little
stone, just where she was looking, for she was no longer weighing
anyth