st peace in which a day of strenuous heat sinks to rest. The
faint breeze in the myrtles was like a sleeper's sigh:--

"Majoresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae--" murmured Grifone to
himself, as he slipped among the cypresses over the grass. Molly
followed him with faltering knees, nearly spent. As always, she was at
the mercy of a clear head, never masterless when a man was near her.
Morally, nervously, she seemed to be dead; so she followed her new lord
as meekly as she had followed her old--that one to Nona across the seas,
this one by gloomy, pent ways through the stale-smelling streets of the
city to the Rocca del Capitan Vecchio.

Meekly enough she went, yet not so far nor so meekly but that she gave
Grifone a genuine surprise. It seems that the air, the exercise,
precautions, what-not, had cried back her escaped wits: certain it is
that, once in the storm-bitten old fortress, she thanked her leader and
rescuer with a tremulous sweetness all her own, and then--by Heaven and
Earth!--urged him gently to go back, "lest her honour should be breathed
upon."

Her honour! Grifone, the romancer, turned sick with amazement. He was
dumbfounded, could not believe his ears, nor yet his eyes; that there
before him should stand that drooping, flagged, pitiful beauty, always
at his discretion, now wholly at his mercy within nine-foot walls, and
talk to him with wet eyes and pleading lips of the Cardinal Virtues.

As soon as he could collect himself he put this before her in a whirl of
words.

_Santo Dio!_ Timidity, prejudice, after what had passed! In what
possible way or by what possible quibble of a priest could anything stay
them now from the harvest of a sown love--two years' sowing, by the
Redeemer, two years' torture; and now--a solid square fortress on a
naked rock, deemed impregnable by anything but black treachery! Let him
make assurance incredibly secure: say the word, and he would go and
silence the old _custode_ for ever. It was done in a moment--what more
could he do?

So he prayed; but Molly was a rock at last. She ignored everything but
the fact that she could never survive the night if he stayed in the
fortress-tower. Such, she assured him, was the fixed habit of her
extraordinary race. She made no pretence of mourning her dead husband;
indeed, her horror of him set her shuddering at his mere name; nor did
she affect to deny that she loved Grifone. It made no difference. She
was luminously mild, used he