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him in the noonday sun on the white road, and his feet had brought
him face to face with her in the hall of the ruined palazzo, a room
magnificent and naked, with here and there a long strip of damask, black
with damp and age, hanging down on a bare panel of the wall. It was
furnished with exactly one gilt armchair, with a broken back, and an
octagon columnar stand bearing a heavy marble vase ornamented with
sculptured masks and garlands of flowers, and cracked from top to
bottom. Charles Gould was dusty with the white dust of the road lying
on his boots, on his shoulders, on his cap with two peaks. Water dripped
from under it all over his face, and he grasped a thick oaken cudgel in
his bare right hand.

She went very pale under the roses of her big straw hat, gloved,
swinging a clear sunshade, caught just as she was going out to meet him
at the bottom of the hill, where three poplars stand near the wall of a
vineyard.

"It has killed him!" he repeated. "He ought to have had many years yet.
We are a long-lived family."

She was too startled to say anything; he was contemplating with a
penetrating and motionless stare the cracked marble urn as though he
had resolved to fix its shape for ever in his memory. It was only when,
turning suddenly to her, he blurted out twice, "I've come to you--I've
come straight to you--," without being able to finish his phrase, that
the great pitifulness of that lonely and tormented death in Costaguana
came to her with the full force of its misery. He caught hold of her
hand, raised it to his lips, and at that she dropped her parasol to pat
him on the cheek, murmured "Poor boy," and began to dry her eyes under
the downward curve of her hat-brim, very small in her simple, white
frock, almost like a lost child crying in the degraded grandeur of the
noble hall, while he stood by her, again perfectly motionless in the
contemplation of the marble urn.

Afterwards they went out for a long walk, which was silent till he
exclaimed suddenly--

"Yes. But if he had only grappled with it in a proper way!"

And then they stopped. Everywhere there were long shadows lying on the
hills, on the roads, on the enclosed fields of olive trees; the shadows
of poplars, of wide chestnuts, of farm buildings, of stone walls; and
in mid-air the sound of a bell, thin and alert, was like the throbbing
pulse of the sunset glow. Her lips were slightly parted as though in
surprise that he should not be looking at her with his usual expression.
His usual expression was unconditionally approving and attentive. He was
in his talks with her the most anxious and deferential of dictators,
an attitude that pleased her immensely. It affirmed her power without
detracting from his dignity. That slight girl, with her little feet,
little hands, little face attractively overweighted by great coils of
hair; with a rather large mouth, whose mere parting seemed to breathe
upon you the fragrance of frankness and generosity, had the fastidious

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