id. Sometimes he rode past the Villa Ariadne, but he never stopped.
He could not bring himself to enter those confines again alone.

In the meantime he had received a cable from Merrihew, stating that he
and Mrs. Merrihew would be at home after September. He read the line
many times. Good old Dan! He was right; it took patience and persistence
to win a woman.

It was in the middle of June that, one afternoon, the concierge handed
him a telegram. It contained but three words:

"Villa Serbelloni, Bellaggio."

CHAPTER XXVII

BELLAGGIO

The narrowness of the imagination of the old masters is generally
depicted in their canvases. Heaven to them was a serious business of
pearly gates, harps, halos, and aerial flights on ambient pale clouds.
Or, was it the imagination of the Church, dominating the imagination of
the artist? To paint halos, or to starve? was doubtless the Hamletonian
question of the Renaissance. Now Hillard's idea of Heaven--and in all of
us it is a singular conception--was Bellaggio in perpetual springtime;
Bellaggio, with its cypress, copper-beech, olive, magnolia, bamboo,
pines, its gardens, its vineyards, its orchards of mulberry trees, its
restful reaches, for there is always a quality of rest in the ability to
see far off; Bellaggio, with the emerald Lecco on one side and the
blue-green Como on the other, the white villages nestling along the
shores, and the great shadowful Italian Alps.

The Villa Serbelloni stands on the wooded promontory, and all day long
the warm sunshine floods its walls and terraces and glances from the
polished leaves of the tropical plants. The villa remains to-day nearly
as it was when Napoleon's forces were in Milan and stabling their horses
in the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazia, under the fading _Last
Supper_, by Da Vinci. It is a hotel now, the annex of one of the great
hostelries down below in the town. A tortuous path leads up to the
villa; and to climb it is to perform the initial step or lesson to
proper mountain-climbing. Here and there, in the blue distances, one
finds a patch of snow, an exhilarating foretaste of the high Alps north
of Domo d' Ossola and south of the icy Rhone.

The six-o'clock boat from Como puffed up noisily and smokily to the
quay, churning her side-paddles. The clouds of sunset lay like crimson
gashes on the western mountain peaks. Hillard stepped ashore
impatiently. What a long day it had been! How white the Villa Serbelloni