om the Orient
before, and they had not impressed her in the same way. Still, she felt
a kind of pleasure in matching her wits with his, even although she felt
she might not come off best in the encounter.

"But would not your attitude of mind be fatal if it were universal,
signore?" she asked.

"Pardon me, I think it is universal."

"You mean that we are not anxious to find the truth?"

"Exactly. Mind you, I do not say that you English people who boast of
your honesty do not in theory hold that truth is the great thing to be
sought after; but in action, in life, no. Let a man be true to truth and
he is put down as a madman, a fool."

"Would you mind giving an example?"

"A dozen if you like. Here is one. It is a commonly accepted theory that
well-being, happiness, depends not on what we possess, but on what we
are. That 'to be' is more than 'to have.' How many are true to their
creed? One in a million? Where one spends his energies in enriching his
life, a million spend theirs on seeking to obtain what by common consent
is evanescent. If half the energy were spent on beautifying character
that is spent on 'getting on' in the ordinary acceptance of the term,
what Christians call the millennium would come."

"Are you not assuming a great deal, signore?"

"But what, signorina?"

"That you understand the motives of the human heart?"

He shrugged his shoulders.

"One judges by what one sees," he said. "And it is best to content
oneself with that. The man who looks beneath the surface goes mad."

"And yet you are not mad?" and she laughed gaily.

"I am not sure," he said, and there was a quiet intensity in his
tones--"no, I am not sure. Sometimes I think I am. But what then,
signorina? We have our little lives to live, our little part to play on
the world's stage."

Again she was reminded of Leicester, and as she thought of him a kind of
shiver passed through her. This was Leicester over again; but another
Leicester--a Leicester with a difference.

"But why play it, if it is so bad?"

"Ah, signorina, do you not think I have asked that question a thousand
times? But then I have lived in the East. What can a man do against
fate? The Arabians have got hold of a great truth: Kismet. Is not all
philosophy centred in that?"

"No," she said, "I do not think so. If that is true, then every bad deed
done would be the expression of God's will. Every murder, outrage, and
abomination has His sanction, His benedictio