took advantage of a moment when Lord Heathfield was talking to Giulio
Musellaro, who had just entered the box, to say to her, looking her full
in the eyes.

'To-morrow?'

'By all means,' she replied with perfect simplicity, as if she had not
noticed the tone of his question.

The next morning, about eleven, he set off on foot to the Palazzo
Barberini through the Via Sistina. It was a road he had often traversed
before--and, for a moment, the impressions of those days seemed to come
back to him, and his heart swelled. The fountain of Bernini shone
curiously luminous in the sunshine, as if the dolphins and the Triton
with his conch-shell had, by some interrupted metamorphose transformed
themselves into a more diaphanous material--not stone, nor yet quite
crystal. The noise of the building of new Rome filled all the piazza and
the adjoining streets; country children ran in and out between the carts
and horses offering violets for sale.

As he passed through the gate and entered the garden, he felt that he
was beginning to tremble. 'Then I _do_ love her still?' he thought to
himself--'Is she still the woman of _my dreams_?'

He looked at the great palace, radiant under the morning sun, and his
spirit flew back to the days when, in certain chill and misty dawns,
this same palace had assumed for him a look of enchantment. That was in
the early times of his happiness, when he came away warm from her kisses
and full of his new-found bliss; the bells of Trinita de' Monti, of San
Isidoro and the Cappuccini rang out the Angelus into the dawning day,
with a muffled peal as if out of the far distance--at the corner of the
street, fires glowed red round cauldrons of boiling asphalt--a little
herd of goats stood against the white wall of the slumbering house----

These forgotten sensations rose up once more out of the depths of his
consciousness, and, for an instant, a wave of the old love swept over
his soul, for one moment he tried to imagine that Elena was still the
Elena of those days, that his happiness had endured till now, that none
of these miserable things were true. As he crossed the threshold of the
palace, all this illusory ferment died away on the instant, for Lord
Heathfield came forward to greet him with his habitual and somewhat
ambiguous smile.

With that his torture began.

Elena appeared, and shaking hands cordially with him in her husband's
presence, she said--'Bravo, Andrea! Come and help us, come and he