as going from her as if she were standing by his
deathbed.

He kissed her suddenly.

"I shall not come back," he said. And the next moment he was gone.

CHAPTER II

Nous passons notre vie a nous forger des chaines, et a
nous plaindre de les porter.--VALTOUR.

For a long time Fay had stood on her balcony looking out towards Rome,
while the remembrance of the last few months pressed in upon her.

It was a week since she had seen Michael, since he had said, "I shall
not come back."

And in the meanwhile she had heard that he had resigned his appointment,
and was leaving Rome at once. She had never imagined that he would act
so quickly, with such determination. She had vaguely supposed that he
would send in his resignation, and then remain on. In novels in a
situation like theirs the man never really went away, or if he did he
came back. Fay knew very little of Michael, but nevertheless she
instinctively felt and quailed before the conviction that he really was
leaving her for ever, that he would reconstruct a life for himself
somewhere in which she could not reach him, in which she would have no
part or lot. He might suffer during the process, but he would do it. His
yea was yea, and his nay, nay. She should see him no more. Some day, not
for a long time perhaps, but some day, she should hear of his marriage.

Suddenly, without a moment's warning, her own life rose up before her,
distorted, horrible, unendurable. The ilexes, solemn in the sunset,
showed like foul shapes of disgust and nausea. The quiet Campagna with
its distant faintly outlined Sabine hills was rotten to the core.

The duke passed across a glade at a little distance, and, looking up,
smiled gravely at her, with a slight courteous gesture of his brown
hand.

She smiled mechanically in response and shrank back into her room. Her
husband had suddenly become a thing to shudder at, repulsive as a
reptile, intolerable. Her life with him, without Michael, stretched
before her like a loathsome disease, a leprosy, which in the
interminable years would gradually eat her away, a death by inches.

The first throes of a frustrated passion at the stake have probably
seldom failed to engender a fierce rebellion against the laws which
light the faggots round it.

The fire had licked Fay. She fled blindfold from it, not knowing
whither, only away from that pain, over any precipice, into any slough.

"I cannot live without him," she sobbed to