e many weeks had passed after his
first meeting with Gloria he was perceptibly in love with the girl,
while he felt not the smallest change in his relations with Donna
Francesca, satisfactorily proved to him that he was right. It would not
have been like an Italian and a Latin to compare his feelings for the
two women by imaginary tests, as, for instance, by asking himself for
which of the two he would make the greater sacrifice. He took it for
granted that the one sentiment was friendship and the other love, and he
acted accordingly.

He was distrustful, indeed, and very suspicious, but not of himself.
Gloria treated him too well. Her eyes told him more than he felt able to
believe. It was not natural that a girl so young and fresh and
beautiful, with the world before her, should fall in love with a man of
his age. That, at least, was what he thought. But the fact that it was
unnatural did not prevent it from taking place.

Reanda ignored certain points of great importance. In the first place,
Gloria had not really the world before her. Her little sphere was
closely limited by her father's morose selfishness, which led him to
keep her in Rome because he liked the place himself, and to keep away
from his countrymen, whom he detested as heartily as Britons living
abroad sometimes do. On the other hand, a vague dread lest the story of
his marriage might some day come to the light kept him away from Roman
society. He had fallen back upon artistic Bohemia for such company as he
wanted, which was little enough, and as his child grew up he had not
understood that she was developing early and coming to womanhood while
she was still under the care of the governess he had provided. He had
not even made any plans for her future, for he did not love her, though
he indulged her as a selfish and easy means of fulfilling his paternal
obligations. It was to get rid of her importunity that he began to take
her to the houses of some of the married artists when she was only
sixteen years old, though she looked at least two years older.

But in such society as that, Reanda was easily first, apart from the
talent which placed him at the head of the whole artistic profession. He
had been brought up, taught, and educated among gentlemen, sons of one
of the oldest and most fastidious aristocracies in Europe, and he had
their manners, their speech, their quiet air of superiority, and
especially that exterior gentleness and modesty of demeano