his struggles and experiments, of his many failures and few results. She
had encouraged him to continue the struggle, had analysed his various
plans of reform, and had given her enthusiastic support to the
partitioning of the Bishop's fief and the secularisation of the
University. Her own life, she said, was too uneventful to write of; but
she spoke of the kindness of her hosts, the Professor and his wife, of
the simple unceremonious way of living in the old Calvinist city, and of
the number of distinguished persons drawn thither by its atmosphere of
intellectual and social freedom.

Odo suspected a certain colourlessness in the life she depicted. The
tone of her letters was too uniformly cheerful not to suggest a lack of
emotional variety; and he knew that Fulvia's nature, however much she
fancied it under the rule of reason, was in reality fed by profound
currents of feeling. Something of her old ardour reappeared when she
wrote of the possibility of publishing her father's book. Her friends in
Geneva, having heard of her difficulty with the Dutch publisher, had
undertaken to vindicate her claims; and they had every hope that the
matter would be successfully concluded. The joy of renewed activity with
which this letter glowed would have communicated itself to Odo had he
received it at a different time; but it came on the day of his marriage,
and since then he had never written to her.

Now he felt a sudden longing to break the silence between them, and
seating himself at his desk he began to write. A moment later there was
a knock on the door and one of his gentlemen entered. The Count Vittorio
Alfieri, with a dozen horses and as many servants, was newly arrived at
the Golden Cross, and desired to know when he might have the honour of
waiting on his Highness.

Odo felt the sudden glow of pleasure that the news of Alfieri's coming
always brought. Here was a friend at last! He forgot the constraint of
their last meeting in Florence, and remembered only the happy
interchange of ideas and emotions that had been one of the quickening
influences of his youth.

Alfieri, in the intervening years, was grown to be one of the foremost
figures in Italy. His love for the Countess of Albany, persisting
through the vicissitudes of her tragic marriage, had rallied the
scattered forces of his nature. Ambitious to excel for her sake, to show
himself worthy of such a love, he had at last shaken off the strange
torpor of his youth,