en, and living on secret love and daily gossip.
What can these do in their gaunt, dull villas--they who detest the sough
of the wind and the sight of a tree, who flee from a dog and scream at a
tempest, who will not read, and whose only lore is the sweet science of
the passions?

This I came to know later. All I saw that day, as I tramped around it
wet and cold, was the gloomy evil shadow of the great place that had
once been a fortress, the barred and shattered windows, the iron-studded
doors, the grass-grown bastions. She had made me kill Phoebus, and yet
I only lived to see her face again.

Sometimes I think love is the darkest mystery of life: mere desire will
not explain it, nor will the passions or the affections. You pass years
amidst crowds and know naught of it: then all at once you meet a
stranger's eyes, and never again are you free. That is love. Who shall
say whence it comes? It is a bolt from the gods that descends from
heaven and strikes us down into hell. We can do nothing.

I went home slowly when evening fell. I had seen her eyes across the
crowd in Orte once, and once across the pool that was the Vadimon, and I
was hers for evermore. Explain that, ye wise men, who in your pride have
long words for all things. Nay, you may be wise, but it is beyond you.

My mother and I spoke but little at this time. That home was a sad one:
the death of the child and the absence of long years had left a chill in
it. We ate together, chiefly in silence: it was always a pain to her
that I was but Pipistrello the gymnast--not a steadfast, deep-rooted,
well-loved citizen of Orte, with a trade to my hand and a place in
church and market. Every day she thought I should wander again; every
day she knew my savings shrank in their bag; every day she heard her
neighbors say, "And your Pippo? will he not quiet down and take a wife
and a calling?"

Poor mother! Other women had their sons safe stay-at-homes, wedded
fathers of children, peaceable subjects of the king, smoking at their
own doors after the day's work was done. She would have been so blessed
had I been like them--I, who was a wrestler and a roysterer, a mere
public toy that had broken down in the sight of all Orte. My father had
never failed as I had failed. He had never killed a child that trusted
in his strength: he had fallen himself and died. That difference between
us was always in her eyes. I saw it when I met them; and she would make
up little knots of com