to invest
her wealth, she had purchased Rivalta, the country-place where she was
now staying.

Emilio, being introduced to the Duchess by the Signora Vulpato, waited
very respectfully on the lady in her box all through the winter. Never
was love more ardent in two souls, or more bashful in its advances. The
two children were afraid of each other. Massimilla was no coquette. She
had no second string to her bow, no _secondo_, no _terzo_, no _patito_.
Satisfied with a smile and a word, she admired her Venetian youth, with
his pointed face, his long, thin nose, his black eyes, and noble brow;
but, in spite of her artless encouragement, he never went to her house
till they had spent three months in getting used to each other.

Then summer brought its Eastern sky. The Duchess lamented having to go
alone to Rivalta. Emilio, at once happy and uneasy at the thought of
being alone with her, had accompanied Massimilla to her retreat. And now
this pretty pair had been there for six months.

Massimilla, now twenty, had not sacrificed her religious principles to
her passion without a struggle. Still they had yielded, though tardily;
and at this moment she would have been ready to consummate the love
union for which her mother had prepared her, as Emilio sat there holding
her beautiful, aristocratic hand,--long, white, and sheeny, ending in
fine, rosy nails, as if she had procured from Asia some of the henna
with which the Sultan's wives dye their fingertips.

A misfortune, of which she was unconscious, but which was torture to
Emilio, kept up a singular barrier between them. Massimilla, young as
she was, had the majestic bearing which mythological tradition ascribes
to Juno, the only goddess to whom it does not give a lover; for Diana,
the chaste Diana, loved! Jupiter alone could hold his own with his
divine better-half, on whom many English ladies model themselves.

Emilio set his mistress far too high ever to touch her. A year hence,
perhaps, he might not be a victim to this noble error which attacks none
but very young or very old men. But as the archer who shoots beyond the
mark is as far from it as he whose arrow falls short of it, the Duchess
found herself between a husband who knew he was so far from reaching the
target, that he had ceased to try for it, and a lover who was carried so
much past it on the white wings of an angel, that he could not get back
to it. Massimilla could be happy with desire, not imagining its issu