I could easily find
out here by inquiring, I suppose. But your name is too sacred. I
can't profane it by speaking it aloud to people who might not bare
their heads at the sound of it."

Susanna tittered.

And on another page (the letter was eight pages long) he said:--

"It is all very beautiful, of course,--the way the town piles itself up
against the hillside, the pink and yellow and lilac _blondeur_ of the
houses, the olive gardens, the radiant sky overhead,--it is all very
picturesque and beautiful. But I am not hungry for beauty--at least,
for this beauty. If you were here with me,--ah, then indeed! But you
are not here, and I am hungry for Craford. There was a time when
Craford used to seem to me the tritest spot in Europe, and the thought
of Italy was luminous of everything romantic, of everything to be
desired. There was a time when nothing gave me such joy as to wake and
remember, 'I am in Italy--in Italy--in Italy!'--in Rome or Florence or
Venice, as the case might be. But the times have changed, have
changed. _You_ were in Italy in those days, and now you are at
Craford. Italy is dust and ashes. I hunger for Craford as the only
place in the world where life is life."

And on still another page:--

"I can't deny that I got a certain emotion in the grey old Cathedral.
For so many generations one's people were baptized there, married
there, buried there. And then how many times must _you_ have
worshipped there, heard holy Mass there. They showed us the relics of
San Guido and the Spina d'Oro, of course, and--well, one is n't made of
wood. I tried to make up my mind in what part of the church you
usually knelt, which prie-dieu was your prie-dieu,--I 'm afraid without
any very notable success. But one felt something like a faint
afterglow of your presence, and it made one's heart beat. Again at the
Palazzo Rosso, under the eyes of all those motionless and silent, dead
and gone Valdeschi, in their armour, in their ruffs and puffs and
periwigs, one could n't be entirely wooden. The servant who showed us
about, an old man who said he had been in the family for I forget how
many hundred years, hailed me as a 'cognate,' having recognized the
name of Craford, and thereupon inducted us into the _appartamenti
segreti_, to exhibit a portrait of my grandsire. Wood itself, I dare
say, must have vibrated a little at that. In the throne-room I was
suddenly caught up and whisked away, back to a rainy af