lings were concerned, and hitherto such experiences had
not fallen in his path. As is usual with such men, when love came at
last, it came with a strength such as boys of twenty do not dream of.
The mature man of thirty years, with his strong and dominant temper,
his carelessness of danger, his high and untried ideals of what a
true affection should be, resisting the first impressions of the
master-passion with the indifference of one accustomed to believe that
love could not come near his life, and was in general a thing to be
avoided--a man, moreover, who by his individual gifts and by his
brilliant position was able to command much that smaller men would
not dream of aspiring to,--such a man, in short, as Giovanni
Saracinesca,--was not likely to experience love-sickness in a mild
degree. Proud, despotic, and fiercely unyielding by his inheritance of
temper, he was outwardly gentle and courteous by acquired habit, a man
of those whom women easily love and men very generally fear.

He did not realise his own nature, he did not suspect the extremes of
feeling of which he was eminently capable. He had at first felt Corona's
influence, and her face and voice seemed to awaken in him a memory, which
was as yet but an anticipation, and not a real remembrance. It was as the
faint perfume of the spring wafted up to a prisoner in some stern
fortress, as the first gentle sweetness that rose from the enchanted
lakes of the cisalpine country to the nostrils of the war-hardened Goths
as they descended the last snow-slopes in their southern wandering--an
anticipation that seemed already a memory, a looking forward again to
something that had been already loved in a former state. Giovanni had
laughed at himself for it at first, then he had dreaded its growing
charm, and at the last he had fallen hopelessly under the spell,
retaining only enough of his former self to make him determined that the
harm which had come upon himself should not come near this woman whom he
so adored.

And behold, at the first provocation, the very first time that by a
careless word she had fired his blood and set his brain throbbing, he had
not only been unable to hide what he felt, but had spoken such words as
he would not have believed he could speak--so bluntly, so roughly, that
she had almost fainted before his very eyes.

She must have been very angry, he thought. Perhaps, too, she was
frightened. It was so rude, so utterly contrary to all that was