rmy to please
his father and would have left it on the latter's death if he had not
been persuaded by his superiors that he had a brilliant career before
him and might be a general at fifty, if he stuck to the service. He
had answered that he would do so if he might have some post of trust
in which he would have time for study; the command of the magazine at
Monteverde was vacant just then, and as no more influential person
wanted to live in such a dull place, he got it.

Yet his house was not much more than a mile from the gate, by a good
high-road; whence it is clear that his solitude was a matter of choice
and not of necessity. He had few friends, however, and none who showed
any inclination to come and see him, though his acquaintances were
numerous; for he had been rather popular in society when a young
subaltern, and had been welcome wherever his elder brother Giovanni
took him.

Giovanni had been very reticent about his affairs, even with his own
family, and during that last winter in Rome, when he had fallen in
love with Angela Chiaromonte, Ugo had been stationed in Pavia and had
known nothing of the affair. Ugo had a vague recollection that
Giovanni was supposed to have been unduly devoted to the gay Marchesa
del Prato when he had been a mere stripling of a sub-lieutenant, fresh
from the Military Academy and barely twenty, though the Marchesa had
been well over thirty, even then. Ugo had been introduced to her long
afterwards, when she was the Princess Chiaromonte, and she had shown
that she liked him, and had asked him to a dance, to which he had not
gone simply because he had given up dancing.

The Princess, however, had misunderstood his reason for not accepting
her invitation and had supposed that he kept away because he had known
Angela's story and resented, for his brother's sake, the treatment the
girl had received. In an hour of idleness, it now occurred to her that
she might find out whether she had been mistaken in this.

For some one had spoken of Giovanni on the previous evening, in
connection with a report that had lately reached Rome to the effect
that an Italian officer, hitherto supposed to have been among the dead
after the battle of Dogali, had been heard of and was living in
slavery somewhere in the interior of Africa. A newspaper had made a
good story of the matter, out of next to nothing, and it had been a
subject of conversation during two or three days. The lady who told it
to the Pr