onderful sight," Pauline maintained.

"Perhaps so; but they were artificial, and one does like things to be
natural."

They had rowed the length of the Giudecca, watching the moon's
vicissitudes among the clouds, and now they had once more turned toward
home, making their way through one of the prettiest _rios_ of the
Tolentini quarter.

"I suppose," Pauline remarked, as they came out upon the Grand Canal,
"that, in a deep sense, artificial things,--of the good kind,--are just
as natural as things we have no control over. I suppose we get our
search-lights from Nature, only in a more round-about way."

"Perhaps we do," May replied; adding, with apparent irrelevance, "and
I'm not sure that I should be willing to have missed it."

* * * * *

That same evening, in the fever ward of a Milan hospital, two figures
were standing beside a narrow cot in earnest consultation. The patient
was a child of ten. The little face had the look of many another little
fever-stricken face, but the hair that lay tossed upon the pillow was of
exceptional beauty.

"Can we save her, Signor Dottore?" It was the nun who spoke.

"We must," the doctor answered, with quiet emphasis.

He stooped and lifted in his hand one of the disordered tresses. It was
neither blonde nor auburn, but pure gold, the lovely gold that sometimes
shines in the heart of the sunset. Even the nun felt the beauty of it.

"Did you ever see such hair as that?" she asked.

He laid the tress back upon the pillow, very gently, and, looking into
the quiet eyes of the Sister, he answered:

"_Never but once._"

XIX

"Decus et Praesidium"

The search-lights of that evening's talk had betrayed more to Pauline
Beverly than the transitory trouble of her sister's mind. In vain did
she try to dwell only upon what May had told her, upon the awakening of
imagination and feeling that had been revealed in the clear depths of
that singularly limpid nature. Unlike as the sisters were, they were yet
of closely kindred fibre, and no one but Pauline could have so clearly
apprehended or so justly gauged the true significance of the experience
which the young girl herself had found so perplexing. Yet because
Pauline so well understood it, the thought of it did not wholly possess
her mind, and she could not escape an unwilling cognizance of something
deeper and far more disquieting, that she had caught a glimpse of in her
own soul.

There w