ilst
scattered articles of clothing, thrown forth chance-wise with a violent
hand, lay upon the massive granite steps. Her feet were bare, her arms
were bare, and her hands, distorted by bitter agony, were pressed to her
face--a face which one saw not, veiled as it was by the tawny gold of her
rippling, streaming hair. What nameless grief, what fearful shame, what
hateful abandonment was thus being hidden by that rejected one, that
lingering victim of love, of whose unknown story one might for ever dream
with tortured heart? It could be divined that she was adorably young and
beautiful in her wretchedness, in the shred of linen draped about her
shoulders; but a mystery enveloped everything else--her passion, possibly
her misfortune, perhaps even her transgression--unless, indeed, she were
there merely as a symbol of all that shivers and that weeps visageless
before the ever closed portals of the unknown. For a long time Pierre
looked at her, and so intently that he at last imagined he could
distinguish her profile, divine in its purity and expression of
suffering. But this was only an illusion; the painting had greatly
suffered, blackened by time and neglect; and he asked himself whose work
it might be that it should move him so intensely. On the adjoining wall a
picture of a Madonna, a bad copy of an eighteenth-century painting,
irritated him by the banality of its smile.

Night was falling faster and faster, and, opening the sitting-room
window, Pierre leant out. On the other bank of the Tiber facing him arose
the Janiculum, the height whence he had gazed upon Rome that morning. But
at this dim hour Rome was no longer the city of youth and dreamland
soaring into the early sunshine. The night was raining down, grey and
ashen; the horizon was becoming blurred, vague, and mournful. Yonder, to
the left, beyond the sea of roofs, Pierre could still divine the presence
of the Palatine; and yonder, to the right, there still arose the Dome of
St. Peter's, now grey like slate against the leaden sky; whilst behind
him the Quirinal, which he could not see, must also be fading away into
the misty night. A few minutes went by, and everything became yet more
blurred; he realised that Rome was fading, departing in its immensity of
which he knew nothing. Then his causeless doubt and disquietude again
came on him so painfully that he could no longer remain at the window. He
closed it and sat down, letting the darkness submerge him with