found himself faced by a most unexpected circumstance. He was
not only in love; that had happened to him at regular intervals ever
since he had been barely fourteen years old, when a beautiful Neapolitan
princess heard him sing and threw her magnificent arms round his neck,
kissing him, and laughing when he kissed her in return; and she had made
him the spoilt darling of her villa at Posilippo for more than three
weeks.

Since then he had regarded his love affairs very much as he looked upon
the weather, as an irregular succession of fine days, dark days, and
stormy days. When he was happily in love, it was a fine day; when
unhappily, it was stormy; when not at all, it was dull--very dull. But
hitherto it had never occurred to him that any one of the three
conditions could last. Like Goethe, he had never begun a love-affair
without instinctively foreseeing the end, and hoping that it might be
painless.

But to his amazement, though he had been prepared to be as cheerfully
cynical and as keen after enjoyment as usual, he now felt, almost from
the first, that there was no end in sight, or even to be imagined. The
beginnings had not been new to him; it was not the first time that
beauty had stirred his pulse, or that a face had awakened sympathy in
that romantic region of feeling between heart and soul which is as far
above the brute animal as it is below the pure spirit. Before now his
voice had brought fire to a woman's eyes, and her lips had parted with
unspoken promises of delight. That was what had happened on the first
day when Pina had left him alone with Ortensia and he had sung to her;
that had all been normal and natural, and only not dull because the
fountain of youth was full and overflowing; that might have happened to
any man between twenty and thirty.

He had gone away light-hearted after the first lesson, with music in his
heart and ears. Was not every beginning of new love a spring that
promised summer, and sometimes a rich autumn too, all in a few weeks,
and with only a dull day or two to follow at the end, instead of winter?

But the next time he saw Ortensia it was a little different, and after
that the difference became greater, and at last very great indeed, till
he no longer recognised the familiar turnings in light love's short
path, and the pretty flowers he had so often plucked by the way did not
grow on each side within easy reach, and the fruit of the garden seemed
endlessly far away, though