lena
had once heard. Often enough, some recollection carried him away
suddenly from the present and disturbed him strangely.

'What are you thinking of at this moment?' Donna Maria would ask him,
looking him deep in the eyes with a shade of suspicion.

'Of you--always of you!' he answered. 'I am sometimes seized with
curiosity to look into my own soul to see if there remains one tiny
particle that does not belong to you, one smallest corner still closed
to your light It is an exploration made for you, as you cannot make it
for yourself. I may say with truth, Maria, that I have nothing more to
give you. You have absolute dominion over me. Never, I think, in spirit
has one human being possessed another so entirely. If my lips were to
meet yours my whole life would be absorbed in yours--I believe I should
die of it.'

She had full faith in his words, for his voice lent them the fire of
truth.

One day, they were in the Belvedere of the Villa Medici and were
watching the gold of the sun fade slowly from the sky while the Villa
Borghese, still bare and leafless, sank gently into a violet mist.
Touched with sudden melancholy she said:

'Who knows how many times you have come here to feel yourself beloved?'

'I do not know,' he answered, like a man lost in a dream, 'I do not
remember. What are you saying?'

She was silent. Then she rose to read the inscriptions written on the
pillars of the little temple. They were, for the most part, written by
lovers, by newly-married couples, by solitary dreamers. All expressed
some sentiment of love, grave or gay; they sang the praises of a beauty
or mourned a lost delight; they told of some burning kiss or ecstasy of
languor; they thanked the ancient wooded glades that had sheltered their
love, pointed out some secret nook to the happy visitor of the morrow,
described the lingering charms of a sunset they had watched. All of
them, whether lovers or married, under the fascination of the eternal
feminine had been seized with lyric fervour in this little lonely
Belvedere to which they ascended by a flight of steps carpeted with moss
as thick as velvet. The very walls spoke. An indefinable melancholy
emanated from these unknown voices of vanished lovers, a sadness that
seemed almost sepulchral, as if they had been epitaphs in a chapel.

Suddenly Maria turned to Andrea. 'You have been here too,' she said.

'I do not know,' he answered again, looking at her in the same dreamy
way as