owing
nothing of herself, so shut off from existence, that marriage with
another than Dario was to her simply the rupture of a long-kept promise
of life in common. It was not the violent wrenching of heart and flesh
that it would have been in the case of a woman who knew the facts of
life. She wept a good deal, and then in a day of self-surrender she
married Prada, lacking the strength to continue resisting everybody, and
yielding to a union which all Rome had conspired to bring about.

But the clap of thunder came on the very night of the nuptials. Was it
that Prada, the Piedmontese, the Italian of the North, the man of
conquest, displayed towards his bride the same brutality that he had
shown towards the city he had sacked? Or was it that the revelation of
married life filled Benedetta with repulsion since nothing in her own
heart responded to the passion of this man? On that point she never
clearly explained herself; but with violence she shut the door of her
room, locked it and bolted it, and refused to admit her husband. For a
month Prada was maddened by her scorn. He felt outraged; both his pride
and his passion bled; and he swore to master her, even as one masters a
colt, with the whip. But all his virile fury was impotent against the
indomitable determination which had sprung up one evening behind
Benedetta's small and lovely brow. The spirit of the Boccaneras had awoke
within her; nothing in the world, not even the fear of death, would have
induced her to become her husband's wife.* And then, love being at last
revealed to her, there came a return of her heart to Dario, a conviction
that she must reserve herself for him alone, since it was to him that she
had promised herself.

* Many readers will doubtless remember that the situation as
here described is somewhat akin to that of the earlier part
of M. George Ohnet's _Ironmaster_, which, in its form as a
novel, I translated into English many years ago. However,
all resemblance between _Rome_ and the _Ironmaster_ is confined
to this one point.--Trans.

Ever since that marriage, which he had borne like a bereavement, the
young man had been travelling in France. She did not hide the truth from
him, but wrote to him, again vowing that she would never be another's.
And meantime her piety increased, her resolve to reserve herself for the
lover she had chosen mingled in her mind with constancy of religious
faith. The ardent heart of a great _a