filled her eyes as she sat down at the little table in the
window and began to write.

"You have sent me a tea equipage fit for an empress! It
is perfect, and I do not know how to thank you. Yes. I
forgive you for writing. Have I really helped you to
play? I am so glad. You say Chopin, so I suppose it is
the piano? I must tell you that I remember all the
stories you told me of Siena, and they add to the
interest of my days. I give English lessons, and am
making enough money to keep myself, but in the intervals
of grammar and '_I Promessi Sposi_' (no less than three
of my pupils are translating that interminable romance
into so-called English) I study the architecture of the
early Renaissance in the old narrow streets, and gaze
upon Byzantine Madonnas in the churches. The Duomo is an
archangel's dream, and I like to go there with my
cousins and steep my soul in its beauty while they say
their prayers and fan themselves. One of them is pretty
and she hates me; the other two are stout and kind and
empty-headed, and their aunt is nothing--a large, heavy
nothing--"

Olive laid down her pen. "What will he think if I write him eight
pages? That I want to begin a correspondence? I do, but he must not
know it."

She tore her letter up into small pieces and wrote two lines on a
sheet of note-paper.

"Thank you very much for your kind present and for what
you say. Of course I forgive you ... and I shall not
forget.--Yours sincerely, OLIVE AGAR."

She went to the window and threw the torn scraps of the first letter
out into the street, and then she sat down again and began to cry; not
for long. Women who know how precious youth is understand that tears
are an expensive luxury, and they are sparing of them accordingly.
They suffer more in the stern repression of their emotions than do
those who yield easily to grief, but they keep their eyelashes and
their complexions.

Olive bathed her eyes presently and smoked a cigarette to calm her
nerves. She was going out that evening to dine with her favourite
pupil and his mother, and she knew they would be distressed if she
looked ill or sad.

Aurelia de Sanctis had had troubles enough of her own. She had married
a patriot, a man with a beautiful eager face and a body spent with
disease, and a fever that never left him since the days when he lurked
in the marshes of the Maremma, c