on that rose above the food
and business of the day. She was confused and bewildered by everything
the strange recluse on the hill said to her,--she could not follow him
at all,--and yet, the purely physical attraction he exercised over her
nature drew her to him like a magnet and kept her in a state of
feverish craving for a love she knew she could never win. She would
have gladly been his servant on the mere chance and hope that possibly
in some moment of abandonment he might have yielded to the importunity
of her tenderness; Adonis himself in all the freshness of his youth
never exercised a more potent spell upon enamoured Venus than this
plain, big bearded man over the lonely, untutored Californian girl with
the large loveliness of a goddess and the soul of a little child. What
was the singular fascination which like the "pull" of a magnetic storm
on telegraph wires, forced a woman's tender heart under the careless
foot of a rough creature as indifferent to it as to a flower he
trampled in his path? Nature might explain it in some unguarded moment
of self-betrayal,--but Nature is jealous of her secrets,--they have to
be coaxed out of her in the slow course of centuries. And with all the
coaxing, the subtle work of her woven threads between the Like and the
Unlike remains an unsolved mystery.

CHAPTER VI

From California to Sicily is a long way. It used to be considered far
longer than it is now but in these magical days of aerial and motor
travelling, distance counts but little,--indeed as almost nothing to
the mind of any man or woman brought up in America and therefore
accustomed to "hustle." Morgana Royal had "hustled" the whole business,
staying in Paris a few days only,--in Rome but two nights; and now here
she was, as if she had been spirited over sea and land by supernatural
power, seated in a perfect paradise-garden of flowers and looking out
on the blue Mediterranean with dreamy eyes in which the lightning flash
was nearly if not wholly subdued. About quarter of a mile distant, and
seen through the waving tops of pines and branching oleander, stood the
house to which the garden belonged,--a "restored" palace of ancient
days, built of rose-marble on the classic lines of Greek architecture.
Its "restoration" was not quite finished; numbers of busy workmen were
employed on the facade and surrounded loggia; and now and again she
turned to watch them with a touch of invisible impatience in her
movement