HE NIGHT-RIDE.

The villa of the Princess Paulina was one of those soft, idyllic
paradises which lie like so many fairy-lands around the dreamy solitudes
of Rome. They are so fair, so wild, so still, these villas! Nature in
them seems to run in such gentle sympathy with Art that one feels as if
they had not been so much the product of human skill as some indigenous
growth of Arcadian ages. There are quaint terraces shadowed by clipped
ilex-trees whose branches make twilight even in the sultriest noon;
there are long-drawn paths, through wildernesses where cyclamens blossom
in crimson clouds among crushed fragments of sculptured marble green
with the moss of ages, and glossy-leaved myrtles put forth their pale
blue stars in constellations under the leafy shadows. Everywhere is the
voice of water, ever lulling, ever babbling, and taught by Art to run in
many a quaint caprice,--here to rush down marble steps slippery with
sedgy green, there to spout up in silvery spray, and anon to spread into
a cool, waveless lake, whose mirror reflects trees and flowers far down
in some visionary underworld. Then there are wide lawns, where the
grass in spring is a perfect rainbow of anemones, white, rose, crimson,
purple, mottled, streaked, and dappled with ever varying shade of sunset
clouds. There are soft, moist banks where purple and white violets grow
large and fair, and trees all interlaced with ivy, which runs and twines
everywhere, intermingling its dark, graceful leaves and vivid young
shoots with the bloom and leafage of all shadowy places.

In our day, these lovely places have their dark shadow ever haunting
their loveliness: the malaria, like an unseen demon, lies hid in their
sweetness. And in the time we are speaking of, a curse not less deadly
poisoned the beauties of the Princess's villa,--the malaria of fear.

The gravelled terrace in front of the villa commanded, through the
clipped arches of the ilex-trees, the Campagna with its soft, undulating
bands of many-colored green, and the distant city of Rome, whose bells
were always filling the air between with a tremulous vibration. Here,
during the long sunny afternoon while Elsie and Monica were crooning
together on the steps of the church, the Princess Paulina walked
restlessly up and down, looking forth on the way towards the city for
the travellers whom she expected.

Father Francesco had been there that morning and communicated to her
the dying message of the ag