tion."

"Don't you think you rather overdo the analogy?" asked poor Stanmer.

"A little more, a little less--it doesn't matter. I believe you are in
my shoes. But of course if you prefer it, I will beg a thousand pardons
and leave them to carry you where they will."

He had been looking away, but now he slowly turned his face and met my
eyes. "You have gone too far to retreat; what is it you know about her?"

"About this one--nothing. But about the other--"

"I care nothing about the other!"

"My dear fellow," I said, "they are mother and daughter--they are as like
as two of Andrea's Madonnas."

"If they resemble each other, then, you were simply mistaken in the
mother."

I took his arm and we walked on again; there seemed no adequate reply to
such a charge. "Your state of mind brings back my own so completely," I
said presently. "You admire her--you adore her, and yet, secretly, you
mistrust her. You are enchanted with her personal charm, her grace, her
wit, her everything; and yet in your private heart you are afraid of
her."

"Afraid of her?"

"Your mistrust keeps rising to the surface; you can't rid yourself of the
suspicion that at the bottom of all things she is hard and cruel, and you
would be immensely relieved if some one should persuade you that your
suspicion is right."

Stanmer made no direct reply to this; but before we reached the hotel he
said--"What did you ever know about the mother?"

"It's a terrible story," I answered.

He looked at me askance. "What did she do?"

"Come to my rooms this evening and I will tell you."

He declared he would, but he never came. Exactly the way I should have
acted!

14th.--I went again, last evening, to Casa Salvi, where I found the same
little circle, with the addition of a couple of ladies. Stanmer was
there, trying hard to talk to one of them, but making, I am sure, a very
poor business of it. The Countess--well, the Countess was admirable. She
greeted me like a friend of ten years, toward whom familiarity should not
have engendered a want of ceremony; she made me sit near her, and she
asked me a dozen questions about my health and my occupations.

"I live in the past," I said. "I go into the galleries, into the old
palaces and the churches. Today I spent an hour in Michael Angelo's
chapel at San Loreozo."

"Ah yes, that's the past," said the Countess. "Those things are very
old."

"Twenty-seven years old," I answered.

"Twenty