rning Rosina saw her cousin leave for the inevitable
visit to Fratelli's, and when he was safely out of the way she put on a
walking-suit, veiled herself thickly, and, taking a carriage, went all
alone to that grand eastern sweep of boulevard whose panorama of sea and
city is so beyond the language of any pen to portray. At the summit she
dismissed the carriage, and rested there alone, leaning against the iron
balustrade, her eyes turned afar, her bosom riven by emotions as
limitless as the horizon that lay before her. A sailing-vessel was
spreading its wings for an Egyptian flight; in the port to her right
the great white ocean liner was loading her cargo; overhead the gulls
whirled, shrieking. But to all she was blind, deaf, unwitting.

For with the conversation upon the ridge-pole of the Milan Cathedral
life had seemed to close for her. The finality of Jack's ruling had
barred the future out of her present forever. There is no more
unmitigated grief for a woman than to be chained to the consequences
begotten of her own way, and to have her judgment taken seriously and
acted upon, to the end that all possible chance of change is swept
forever beyond the reach of her will.

She hung there against the cold iron and knew no tears, because her
wretchedness had outstripped their solace.

Her reasons had reached the pass where they craved to be overruled, and
no one was going to overrule them. She did not state the facts to
herself in so many words, but she felt her helplessness and moaned her
pain.

Oh, that pain! the pain of one who sees the light too late, who divines
the sun only by the splendor of the glow which it has left behind. What
memories they hold to torture everlastingly! What reveries they nurse
from thence on evermore!

If only more had been said, or less! If only more had been denied, or
granted! There is forever imprinted on the brain some one especial look
which time can never dim--some special word whose burden nor sleep nor
wake will lighten.

There, at her feet, the Isar rushed, and through the myriad murmur of
its rapids his voice came back to her. "_Tout est fini_,--all is
finished!" he had said, with that enveloping mist of melancholy in which
his spirit shrouded itself so easily. And then a wax taper flashed
before the blackness that sheathed her vision, and she looked in
heart-quivering agony upon the dumb appeal of those great, brown eyes,
with their shadows doubled by the torturing of the