most unimaginable happiness, of a kind which
would perhaps have hardly satisfied his more modern instincts. She saw a
maiden of indescribable beauty, brought up in unapproachable
perfections, guarded by the all but insuperable jealousy of an ideal
home. Orsino was to love this vision, and none other, from the first
meeting to the term of his natural life, and was to win her in the face
or difficulties such as would have made even Giovanni, the incomparable,
look grave. This radiant creature was also to love Orsino, as a matter
of course, with a love vastly more angelic than human, but not hastily
nor thoughtlessly, lest Orsino should get her too easily and not value
her as he ought. Then she saw the two betrothed, side by side on shady
lawns and moonlit terraces, in a perfectly beautiful intimacy such as
they would certainly never enjoy in the existing conditions of their own
society. But that mattered little. The wooing, the winning and the
marrying of the exquisite girl were to make up Orsino's life, and fifty
or sixty years of idyllic happiness were to be the reward of their
mutual devotion. Had she not spent twenty such years herself? Then why
should not all the rest be possible?

The dreams came and went and she was too sensible not to laugh at them.
That was not the youth of Giovanni, her husband, nor of men who even
faintly resembled him in her estimation. Giovanni had wandered far, had
seen much, and had undoubtedly indulged more than one passing affection,
before he had been thirty years of age and had loved Corona. Giovanni
would laugh too, if she told him of her vision of two young and
beautiful married saints. And his laugh would be more sincere than her
own. Nevertheless, her dreams haunted her, as they have haunted many a
loving mother, ever since Althaea plucked from the flame the burning
brand that measured Meleager's life, and smothered the sparks upon it
and hid it away among her treasures.

Such things seem foolish, no doubt, in the measure of fact, in the
glaring light of our day. The thought is none the less noble. The dream
of an untainted love, the vision of unspotted youth and pure maiden, the
glory of unbroken faith kept whole by man and wife in holy wedlock, the
pride of stainless name and stainless race--these things are not less
high because there is a sublimity in the strength of a great sin which
may lie the closer to our sympathy, as the sinning is the nearer to our
weakness.

When old