y had renounced had returned
with an exile's alien face.

Seeing that he remained silent, she rose and lit the shaded lamp on the
table. He watched her as she moved across the room. Her step had lost
none of its flowing grace, of that harmonious impetus which years ago
had drawn his boyish fancy in its wake. As she bent above the lamp, the
circle of light threw her face into relief against the deepening shadows
of the room. She had changed, indeed, but as those change in whom the
springs of life are clear and abundant: it was a development rather than
a diminution. The old purity of outline remained; and deep below the
surface, but still visible sometimes to his lessening insight, the old
girlish spirit, radiant, tender and impetuous, stirred for a moment in
her eyes.

The lamplight fell on the pamphlets she had pushed aside. Odo picked one
up. "What are these?" he asked.

"They were sent to me by the English traveller whom Andreoni brought
here."

He turned a few pages. "The old story," he said. "Do you never weary of
it?"

"An old story?" she exclaimed. "I thought it had been the newest in the
world. Is it not being written, chapter by chapter, before our very
eyes?"

Odo laid the treatise aside. "Are you never afraid to turn the next
page?" he asked.

"Afraid? Afraid of what?"

"That it may be written in blood."

She uttered a quick exclamation; then her face hardened, and she said in
a low tone: "De Crucis has been with you."

He made the half-resigned, half-impatient gesture of the man who feels
himself drawn into a familiar argument from which there is no issue.

"He left yesterday for Germany."

"He was here too long!" she said, with an uncontrollable escape of
bitterness.

Odo sighed. "If you would but let me bring him to you, you would see
that his influence over me is not what you think it."

She was silent a moment; then she said: "You are tired tonight. Let us
not talk of these things."

"As you please," he answered, with an air of relief; and she rose and
went to the harpsichord.

She played softly, with a veiled touch, gliding from one crepuscular
melody to another, till the room was filled with drifts of sound that
seemed like the voice of its own shadows. There had been times when he
could have yielded himself to this languid tide of music, letting it
loosen the ties of thought till he floated out into the soothing dimness
of sensation; but now the present held him. To Fulvia, too,