subject of
the Raritans' whereabouts. These letters were barely despatched when he
was visited by a luminous thought. The idea that Viola intended to
relinquish Italian music for that of Wagner had never seemed to him
other than an incongruity. "Idiot that I am!" he exclaimed; "she came
abroad to study at Milan, and there is where she is. She must have left
the Orient Express at Munich and gone straight down through the Tyrol."
And in the visitation of this comforting thought Tantalus and Sisyphus
went back into the night from which they had come; in their place came
again the blue-eyed divinity whose name is Hope.

It is not an easy journey, nor a comfortable one, from Vienna to Milan,
but Hope aiding, it can be accomplished without loss of life or reason.
And Hope aided Tristrem to his destination, and there disappeared. In
all Milan no intelligence of Viola could be obtained. He wrote again to
her. The result was the same. "I am as one accursed," he thought, and
that night he saw himself in dream stopping passers in the street,
asking them with lifted hat had they seen a girl wonderfully fair, with
amber eyes. He asked the question in French, in German, in Italian,
according to the nationality of those he encountered, and once, to a
little old woman, he spoke in a jargon of his own invention. But she
laughed, and seemed to understand, and gave him the address of a
lupanar.

He idled awhile in Milan, and then went to Florence, and to Rome, and to
Naples, crossing over, even, to Palermo; and then retracing his steps,
he visited the smaller cities and outlying, unfrequented towns.
Something there was which kept telling him that she was near at hand,
waiting, like the enchanted princess, for his coming. And he hunted and
searched, outwearied at times, and refreshed again by resuscitations of
hope, and intussusceptions of her presence. But in the search his nights
were white. It was rare for him to get any sleep before the dawn had
come.

Early in spring he reached Milan again. He had written from Bergamo to
the Rue Scribe, asking that his letters should be forwarded to that
place, and among the communications that were given him on his arrival
was a cablegram from New York. _Come back_, it ran; _she is here_. It
was from his grandfather, Dirck Van Norden, and as Tristrem read it he
trembled from head to foot. It was on a Tuesday that this occurred, and
he reflected that he would just about be able to get to Havre in t