the University, and had been the means of drawing to
Pianura several teachers of distinction from Padua and Pavia. It was her
dream to build up a seat of learning which should attract students from
all parts of Italy; and though many young men of good family had
withdrawn from the classes when the Barnabites were dispossessed, she
was confident that they would soon be replaced by scholars from other
states. She was resolved to identify herself openly with the educational
reform which seemed to her one of the most important steps toward civic
emancipation; and she had therefore acceded to the request of the
faculty that, on receiving her degree, she should sustain a thesis
before the University. This ceremony was to take place a few days hence,
on the Duke's birthday; and, as the new charter was to be proclaimed on
the same day, Fulvia had chosen as the subject of her discourse the
Constitution recently promulgated in France.

She pushed aside the bundle of political pamphlets which she had been
studying, and sat looking out at the strip of garden beyond the arches
of the cloister. The narrow horizon bounded by convent walls symbolised
fitly enough the life she had chosen to lead: a life of artificial
restraints and renunciations, passive, conventual almost, in which even
the central point of her love burned, now, with a calm devotional glow.

The door in the cloister opened and the Duke crossed the garden. He
walked slowly, with the listless step she had observed in him of late;
and as he entered she saw that he looked pale and weary.

"You have been at work again," she said. "A cabinet-meeting?"

"Yes," he answered, sinking into the Abbess's high carved chair.

He glanced musingly about the dim room, in which the shadow of the
cloister made an early dusk. Its atmosphere of monastic calm, of which
the significance did not escape him, fell soothingly on his spirit. It
simplified his relation to Fulvia by tacitly restricting it within the
bounds of a tranquil tenderness. Any other setting would have seemed
less in harmony with their fate.

Better, perhaps, than Fulvia, he knew what ailed them both. Happiness
had come to them, but it had come too late; it had come tinged with
disloyalty to their early ideals; it had come when delay and
disillusionment had imperceptibly weakened the springs of passion. For
it is the saddest thing about sorrow that it deadens the capacity for
happiness; and to Fulvia and Odo the joy the