Signa, Vol. 3 (1875): a machine-readable transcription

Ouida (1839-1908)

Victorian Women Writers Project: an Electronic Collection

Signa, Vol. 3

        All chapters occur as DIV0. All quotation marks, hyphens, dashes, apostrophes and colons have been transcribed as entity references.

        All apostrophes and single right quotation marks are encoded as ’.

        Any hyphens occurring in line breaks have been removed; all hyphens are encoded as ‐ and em dashes as —.

• Italian

• 13-Mar-1997
  Kathryn Benedict, contributing editor.
  
  • finished data entry.
  
  
• 25-July-1997
  Perry Willett, general editor.
  
  • finished TEI-encoding, proofing and editing.
  
  

(front)

        

SIGNA. A Story.

By

OUIDA.

Getto una palma al mare, e mi va al fondo.
Agli altri vedo il piombo navigare."--TUSCAN SONG.

I throw a palm into the sea: the deeps devour it.
Others throw lead, and lo! it buoyant sails.

VOL. III.

(front)

        LONDON: BRADBURY, AGNEW, & CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.

SIGNA.

CHAPTER I.

        The boy wrote now from here, now from there--now from a mountain town, where his music was playing in a summer theatre; now from a lake palace, where some great prince had summoned him; now from the cities, where foreign directors were seeing him; now from the seashore, where great ladies were wooing him. He said so little; he was hidden from them in a golden cloud; they could scarcely follow him even in fancy. But he was well, he was happy,

he was triumphant--he wanted for nothing. They had to be content with that, and to imagine the rest--as best they could.

        All the northern country was echoing with his music, up to the edges of the Alps, and from the one sea to the other, and the boy was wandering, welcomed and praised and rejoiced over everywhere, and with his own melodies always ringing in his ears, as the gorgeous genius of the "Anacreon of Genoa" had been three hundred years before. This was all they knew, and they had to be content with it.

        He was gone over the land like one of the improvisatori of the old times, with the sound of his "sweet singing" in herald of him everywhere; their lark had gone up against the sun; they could see him no longer; they had their work to do, the work that kept their eyes on the earth.

        Bruno laboured on his lands, and went to and fro the markets, and toiled early and late in all weathers, and seldom spoke to any living thing except his dog or his oxen; Luigi Dini opened and folded the black robes of the brethren, and

saw the sick and the dead carried by, and unclosed and closed the church doors, and thought that the days grew very long; poor merry Sandro died, quite suddenly, of a ball in his throat; and Palma had to sell her hair to a barber in the town to pay the grave, and to keep the boys and the roof over their heads as best she could, two of them earning something small, and three of them nothing at all; old Teresina fell down her wooden stairs and broke her leg, and could trot about no more as her chief pleasure had always been to do, but had to lie and look over the tops of her roses in the little square window, and only knew when the sun went down by the glow in the bit of sky that was all she could ever now see;--the weeks and the months were very slow to all these, and the luxuriant summer only brought them heat and pain. They could not follow their lark, even in fancy; he was gone so high and so far; and though the summer had come for them, it was all dark and dust. But they were glad to think he was away against the sun--glad all of them.

        One morning Bruno went down early to the

market in the city. It was August, and he had samples of his wheat with him. He worked hard; never looking over through the belt of pines to the brook under the rushes; worked as hard as he had done when he had worked with a great hope and goal before him; partly because it was the one habit of his life, partly because he so had least time for thought; and also--although, indeed, the boy needed nothing now, and made his money for himself, and would have none sent to him--because the time might come that he would want it.

        "Di doman non si è certezza."

        One never knew--so Bruno said to himself, and laid by what he could in the old leathern pouch thrust behind a loose brick in the chimney corner, that had once held the purchase-money of the land that he had lost.

        It was five in the morning; a morning cold with that fresh alpine clear coldness which precedes at daybreak the hottest weather for the noon, and refreshes the thirsty earth with its dense dews, that are as thick as rain. On the bridge he met a girl slowly toiling under a great

burden of linen; she stopped as he passed her, and lifted her large eyes to him. She was very thin and very brown.

        "Is it you, Palma?" he said to her; he could not refuse to stop: poor Sandro had been a good friend and kindly to the boy. "Is there anything I can do for you? You look ill?"

        "No," she said, timidly. "I wanted to know--Do you have any news of him ever?"

        "All is well with him--yes," said Bruno. "That Gigi sees--sees in the printed papers. He has not written now--not for some time. You see, it is not as if we could read what he writes or write ourselves. I daresay it seems to him as if we forgot, since we can never answer."

        "He will not think that we forget," said Palma, and stood still with her great eyes clouded.

        "No. But no doubt it seems as if we were all dead. It is to be half-dead in a way--not to read and write--I see that now. I used to think it only fit for poor pale fools in cities. Not a thing for a man--unless one were a priest."

        "But he knows we cannot write," said Palma,

"and Luigi Dini does for us--for you, at least. Perhaps it is he himself who does forget."

        "Why not?" said Bruno. The thought was like an arrow in his heart, but he would never open his lips to blame the boy.

        "Why not?" murmured the girl.

        Why not indeed? They had nothing to do but remember;--he had all the world with him.

        "Good day," she added, and moved to take up the bundle of linen, that she had rested for a moment on the parapet of the bridge.

        But Bruno looked at her curiously. He had seen her a score of times since the Lenten time when Sandro had died, but he had not noticed before that her hair was clipped short to her head like a young conscript's.

        "What have you done with all your braids?" he asked.

        "I sold them."

        "What for?"

        "To pay for my father's burial:--it just paid it."

        "I wish you had let me know, I would have paid. Poor child! I never noticed it before."

        "That is because I tied a handkerchief on. The barber shaved my head quite close. Now the hair is grown just a little."

        "You are a good girl. Can you manage to live--any how?"

        "Yes. We can just live. Franco and Beppo earn a little."

        "But you must work very hard?"

        "I have always done that. Why not?"

        "But you are a pretty girl when you have your hair. You must marry."

        Palma gave a quick shudder.

        "Oh, no."

        "And why not?"

        She coloured to the bronze rings of her shorn curls.

        "My brothers will want me many years yet; and then I shall be old."

        She nodded to him, and went her way over the bridge, carrying the linen she had washed for the canon's housekeeper on the hill. Bruno walked onward: he thought little of the girl--though he had always liked her for her courage and her industry--he thought much of one of her

answers: "Perhaps it is he himself who does forget." Yes;--of course it was he himself; it is always the one who goes that forgets, always the one who is left that remembers.

        No doubt the boy forgot them; why not? He said so to his own heart every day all through the long months when the letters came so seldom and the printed papers were so full of Signa's name and Signa's music.

        He walked on trying to fancy what his boy looked like in all those strange cities amongst all those strange faces; trying to fancy how it was when the streets were thronged and the flowers were tossed and the theatres were besieged and the vivas were shouted: he had seen such nights of applause, such hours of homage himself in carnival times in his youth when Florence had found some singer or some musician in whom its heart delighted, and for whom its winter roses were gathered, and its voices uplifted in one accord.

        But he could not imagine the boy amongst such nights as these--Pippa's son--the little delicate lad running with barefoot by him in the

dust, and looking up through his curls to see if the heavens had opened to show him the singing children of God.

        It perplexed him. He could not grapple with it.

        All through the warm months, in the long oppressive evenings, with the thunder-clouds brooding overhead, or the sirocco driving the straw and dust through the gates, the old man had sat in the doorways and read out to all the many listening groups this tale and that, this history and the other, of the victories of Signa's music wherever it was heard, welcomed in every little city of the plains and every gay town on the shores of lake or sea as the carnations were welcomed and the swallows and the nightingales;--all through those months Bruno, hearing, had come no nearer to comprehension of it, no nearer than the vague dull sense that the world had got the boy and he had lost him.

        He had grown used to it, as we grow in a manner used to any pain, wearing it daily as the anchorite his girdle of sharp iron; he was proud of it in his own silent way as the seamen on the

shores of Genoa were proud when they heard how the old world had been forced to take an empire from their
"Nudo nocchior; promettitor di regni." Proud when he went through the Lastra or down the streets of the city, and men who had long shunned him paused in his path to say, "and that young genius they talk so much of northward, is that indeed your boy?" and he answered, "yes: it is Pippa's son," and went his way. Proud so. Proud of the boy and for him:--the little corncrake that left the fields to cleave his flight where eagles go.

        But he could not comprehend it; could not realize that the little fellow so late singing his sequence at mass, with the other children, in holy week, with his ragged homespun shirt, and hungry stomach and sad eyes, could now have name and fame with other men, and be spoken of as they spoke in Florence of the great Cimarosa.

        It was true, no doubt, and he was sure of it; and working in his field he thought of nothing else, and said for ever to himself, "if he has got his desire, what does it matter for me?" but still

it was dark to him; there were times when the great oppressive weight of it lay on him as if he had been buried alive, and in his grave could hear the footsteps of the boy going away--away--away, farther and farther, always over his head, but beyond his reach and beyond his call for ever.

        It was a stupid feeling, no doubt, born out of ignorance and emotion and solitude; but that was what he felt often--often in the quiet lonely nights when there was no moon in the skies, and no sound on the mountains.

        This day he walked straight to the city, and did his trafficking in the square before the heat had come, and while the shadows were still long on the steps between the white lions.

        By noon these matters were done with by most of the men, for the weather was at its sultriest, and the shade of the cool arched granaries and winebarns in the country better to be desired than the scorching pavement. He went into the place of S. Maria Novella, having a last errand there to a harness maker; in the blinding sunshine of the unshadowed square there was a white slender figure, a boy's face, a gesture that he knew--be-

fore he could speak Signa had thrown himself upon his neck.

        "It is I! yes it is I," he cried, "I have just come by the iron way that you hate so--I thought I would walk, I thought I might meet you, being Friday. Ah, dearest, truest, best friend!--all that I am you have made me; all that I may become will be yours!"

        Bruno looked at him speechless. Once before he had rejoiced so greatly--only to find his error. He dared not now be glad.

        He gazed at the boy--so changed and yet in so much the same--the solitary sunlit square went round and round him like a whirlpool of white fire. The great stones seemed to heave and dance.

        "I made sure now you had forgotten," he muttered; and stood stupidly like own of his own oxen when it has been very long in the dark, and is led out on a sudden into the full blaze of the noon.

        "Forgotten. Did you think me lower than the beasts?" said Signa, and he kissed the man's brown hands.

        "Yes, it is true," he added. "Yes, I was base not to come back long ago. But every day I said to-morrow, and every morrow brought some change, some wonder, some great thing to do or to hear; and so the summer has slipped away as the spring did. But forget!--oh, never, never! What would I be now but for you?--a starved and beaten thing in Lippo's house."

        "Let us go in here," said Bruno, and he mounted the steps of the church with the white marble of it shining in the noonday sun, and went into the body of it where the light was like a great rainbow stretching from one stained window to another. There were a few people about it, some gazing at the pictures; some kneeling in dark corners.

        Bruno drew him down the marble steps into the silence of the green cloister; there was not a soul there; the gate was left open, the guardian of the church dozed in the heat, sitting in the shade under the pillars.

        In the solitude where only Giotto's faded saints and angels looked upon them, he drew the boy close to him and looked in his face.

        "My dear, my dear! God is good!" he muttered. "I doubted it, aye, I doubted; God forgive my doubt. When that traitor took the land I could have killed him. God is good. My hands are clean. And the world has not taken you from me; men have not made you forget. Ah, our God is good. Let us praise him!"

        He leaned against one of the columns with his face bent down on his arm; his bare chest heaved, his strong nervous limbs trembled; the hot sun poured in on his uncovered head, then silently he put his hand out and grasped Signa's, and led him into the Spanish Chapel, and sank on his knees.

        The glory of the morning streamed in from the cloister; all the dead gold and the faded hues were transfigured by it; the sunbeams shone on the face of Laura, the deep sweet colours of Bronzino's Coena glowed upward in the vault amidst the shadows; the company of the blessed, whom the old painters had gathered there, cast off the faded robes that the Ages had wrapped them in, and stood forth like the tender spirits that they were, and seemed to say, "Nay,

we, and they who made us, are not dead, but only waiting."

        It is all so simple and so foolish there; the war-horses of Taddeo that bear their lords to eternity as to a joust of arms; the heretic dogs of Memmi, with their tight wooden collars; the beauteous Fiammetta and her lover, throning amongst the saints; the little house, where the Holy Ghost is sitting, with the purified saints listening at the door, with strings tied to their heads to lift them into paradise; it is all so quaint, so childlike, so pathetic, so grotesque,--like a set of wooden figures from its Noah's Ark that a dying child has set out on its little bed, and that are so stiff and ludicrous, and yet which no one well can look at and be unmoved, by reason of the little cold hand that has found beauty in them.

        As the dying child to the wooden figures, so the dead faith gives to the old frescoes here something that lies too deep for tears; we smile, and yet all the while we say,--if only we could believe like this; if only for us the dead could be but sleeping!

        Bruno sank on his knees on the bench by the west door, under the beautiful Bronzino that the shadows were so covetous of; where the word Silenzio is written on the wall.

        In him the old simple blind faith lived, as it had lived in the hearts of the old painters, that had covered the stones here with their works.

        He cried straight to heaven, and he believed that heaven heard him.

        Holding the boy's hand in his, and with his head thrown back, and his eyes meeting the full sunrays that glanced from Bronzino's Christ to him, he blessed God, who had brought back the body safe and the soul pure.

        Then his head sank, his forehead fell upon the back of the bench; he knelt silent many moments. He spoke to his God alone--or to his dead; not even Signa heard.

CHAPTER II.

        "Let us talk here a little," he said, and they went out into the arcades of Giotto's cloister, where the mountain winds, and the autumn rains, and the fierce beating of the midsummer suns, have stripped the saints and prophets bare.

        "And you are a great man!" he said, with a slow soft smile. "A great man! you--Pippa's son--my little cowherd and sheep boy! Forgive me, dear; it seems strange."

        "Nay, the music in me is great; not I;" said Signa. "I am like the reed that the gods took to breathe through--that is all."

        "And that is pretty of you to say. But a man is known by his works, as a tree by her

fruit; and yours are good. You were no dreamer, my boy, as we thought."

        "But if you had not sold the land!" said Signa.

        Bruno winced.

        "Why talk of that? What is done is done. The land was for you; you were right to have it sold. I see that now, dear--it was only hard at first."

        "But who has it? You said a traitor."

        "Lippo has it. He brought it secretly. Honestly as money goes--but not fairly--there is a difference. But why speak of these things. Never put back on your teeth a walnut that has the worm. Dear--you think I have suffered. Do not poison your pleasure with that fancy. When the news came that winter night, I had more content--for you--than ever the land would have brought with it. I said, 'God is good.' God is good. He has given you your heart's desire; and you have come back safe; and have not forgotten."

        He was leaning against one of the columns, the boy was sitting on the marble ledge where

the graves are. Bruno looked down on him as the sun shone above his young upturned face. Signa was not much changed; his dress was all of white linen, but it was very simple; the sea, the travel, and the hope, and new glory of his life had warmed his cheek, and invigorated his limbs; that was all; but there was about him, and upon him, that immeasurable, indescribable alteration which raises up the childhood that dreams into the manhood that has accomplished; he was a boy still, but he was a boy who had fought his fight, and had conquered.

        He was no longer Endymion sighing fitfully in a tormented sleep with vain desire; he was the Endymion who had held his divine mistress in his arms, and vanquished, and possessed her.

        "Do not think of the land any more, ever again," said Bruno. "It was of use. That was all it could ever have been. It is for me now as I had never had it. That is all. Dear, tell me of yourself rather;--you have so much to tell."

        It was a noble lie.

        The land was the cruellest loss of his life.

Every time that the voice of his brother echoed up through the pines, every time that he saw the strange hands amongst the olive boughs and the river rushes, the longing of vengeance possessed him as ardently as in the moment of Lippo's first taunts, the sharpness of his loss was as poignant to him as in the hour when the had first said to the notary, "sell." But Bruno gave his gifts with both hands; he did not weight them with a millstone of appraisement.

        Signa had so much to tell; days, weeks, months, could not have exhausted for him the story of his wanderings and his victories. He had lost nothing of his simple eager faith, nothing of his spiritual endless aspirations; only now, instead of dreaming of victory he had achieved it; now, instead of the passionate praises of genius, he had its passionate joys.

        He told his story sitting under the arches of the noble cloisters, with the strong August sun making the marble warm like human flesh. It was the same story that Bruno had heard from the letters and from the printed sheets, month after month; but it only now took life and

colour for him, it only now became an actual truth for him, heard from the boy's happy breathless lips, with the blue shining above the open court.

        Signa was a great singer in the land, as Cimarosa had been in his, with his gay melodies caught from the threshing barns and the orange-gatherers and the coral-fishers and the vintage-dancers; as the poet Chiabrera had been with his mighty odes that echoed like the roll of battle; as the improvisatore Bernardo had been with his silver lute that held the Romans still as listening goats that circle round a shepherd's pipe:--that he could understand now, wonderful though it was; now that the boy's eyes shone back to his, and the boy's own lips told him of cities and villas and seashores and mountain palaces, and the tumult of towns in summer nights, and the chorus of strange voices under his casement singing his own songs till the dawn broke.

        He could understand it now; and though it took Pippa's son away from him--quite away into a world where he himself could never tread--yet he was proud of it and glad--bewildered, but very glad.

        "That you should be so great, you little thing!" he murmured, and smiled, thinking of the night coming in from the Certosa, when he had carried the child, worn-out and tired, as the owls cried and Signa dreamed of the Fair Angel.

        To Bruno the boy was only such a little thing--no more than a girl was, or a bulrush, or a willow rod in the stream.

        And half the nation was chaunting his music, and the other half babbling of his name!

        "The land did not go in vain!" he thought, with a thought that he would not utter aloud, lest it should seem a regret or a reproach; and then he rose and shook himself, with a glow of joy on his olive skin and a softened light beaming under his straight drooped eyes.

        "Let us go, dear. Hark! The clock is striking. We have talked here three hours. I will get your baggage; you left it yonder--yes? It is not fair to keep you from the Lastra. And you are tired, too, no doubt, and hungry. Will you sleep to-night on your own little hard bed, after lying under those great nobles' roofs? Do palaces smell sweeter than our hills? I think they cannot."

        Talking so, with a quickness and abundance quite rare to him, that came with the proud overflowing of his silent heart, he went and sought the boy's small packages, and swung them over his shoulders and came out again into the hot sunshine smiling.

        He was only a peasant, with bare feet and shirt open at his breast, and his face dark with many years of toil; but there was nobility about him, and dignity, and freedom.

        Signa, who, though he had half forgotten, loved him, looked at the dark erect figure of him against the white marble and the blue sky, and thought the old painters might have painted him there in the chapter-house as the Shepherd King, the Re Pastore of Metastasio.

        "Can you walk, dear? Oh, it is too far! I did not bring the cart to-day," said Bruno.

        Signa laughed.

        "Too far! The dear old, dirty, ugly road that I had to trot down in an hour after Baldo's beast! No; I should like to see every stone of it! And perhaps the people will know me. I think so."

        So they went.

        "You should have a chariot, like a young prince; and you walk as we do in the dust," said Bruno with a smile. He was so proud and glad. All jests seemed sweet.

        "I love the dust. Does it not go to the Lastra?"

        And he stooped and raised a little of the dust in his hand and kissed it and blew it away and laughed. He too was so happy. All trifles had their charm.

        "Poor Palma asked for you this morning," said Bruno.

        "Palma did? I have brought a trinket for her."

        "A trinket! She sold her hair in Lent to pay her father's burying."

        They went on along the road. It was dusty, noisy, unlovely, as it always is; with the people sitting out at their doors, and the smiths and the joiners and the coopers and the straw-plaiters all at work in the darksome open interiors.

        Presently one woman clapped her hands.

        "If that is not little Signa that used to live on the hill!"

        And then a blacksmith stood and stared.

        "What, Bruno Marcello! Is that your boy?"

        And the contadini going by in their carts turned and looked and shouted.

        "That is Signa, only he looks like a lordling all in his white and with shoes on!"

        And they drove away and said in the gates of the Lastra:

        "Signa is come home. He will be here in a very little; we passed him on the road."

        But the road was long to Signa; for now one would speak, and then another would shake hands, and one man would fetch out a stoup of drink, and some girl would give him a fresh carnation; and what with one thing and another, and the gathering groups and the recognitions and the wonder and the eager greetings and the reluctant farewells, his path was made as slow as any young conqueror's going along laurel-hung streets in war-time; and by the time they came in sight of the shields on the Porta Fiorentina, it was nearly night, and the Ave Maria was sounding everywhere, and the lamps were beginning to be lighted.

        In this country people gather together, like mosquitoes after a wisp of lighted straw, on the slenderest pretext, to follow and to watch, and to chatter.

        There was a throng on his steps laughing, shouting, chattering, not knowing very well why they went, but vaguely fancying that he, since the world had made a king of him, must have grown rich, and would by and by throw some gold to the foremost.

        There was a little crowd at his back, and out of the great east gate there came another crowd; there was a white-haired old man at their head; they had torches flaring red on the dusk; women ran with them and children; the deep voices and the shrill ones rose together--they were singing his own Death Chaunt of the Christians. Luigi Dini, who led them, had taught it to them to sing as requiem in the Holy week of the past Lenten season.

        When the peasants had driven in saying, "Signa comes," the old man had called his choristers together, and many young brethren of the confraternity, and had said to them, "Let

us meet him with his own music--there can be no welcome like that."

        Signa stopped suddenly; his heart swelled, his eyes swam; he had had many a grander triumph, many a more radiant spectacle, many a louder-toned praise from bigger multitudes; but none had moved him like that little crowd in the fitful glow of the torches, those fresh, rough, untrained voices singing his own music in the dusk and the heat of the summer night--at home.

        They came out to meet him as a conqueror; and, only such a little while before, he had been a little child they mocked at for hearing the angels singing in the clouds, when for their ears only the crickets chattered in the corn.

        He stood still while the torches tossed about him, and the strong familiar voices throbbed and thrilled upon the air; then he threw his left arm round Bruno's shoulders, and stretched his right hand out to the old man; and he looked at the brown well-known faces turned upward in the shadow of the old grey gate:

        "Dear friends! what I am, these two have made me. The heavens would not have opened for

me if on earth these two had not succoured me. When I am gone, will you remember that?"

        In an after time the people said to one another, "What did he mean--'when I am gone'?"

        Then, standing outside the gateway there, and stretching in a long line through the Lastra, while every casement and every doorway had its cluster of eager faces, they all flung their torches in the air, and shouted vivas loud enough to stir the soldier soul of dead Ferruccio, sleeping far away; then, as the peasants had done above Fiastra before the world had heard of him, they lifted him on their shoulders; and, laughing and shouting and crying and leaping like young children in their pride and pleasure, they bore him away under the arch of the old gate, chaunting the chorus of the Christians, while from every dark doorway and every grated window heads were thrust and hands were offered, and in the small dull town just going to its sleep there was one universal outcry:

        "It is little Signa come home!"

        Up by the shrine of the Good Counsel, Lippo's window alone was dark.

        And Palma, mending the great holes in her brother's shirts by the light of a solitary oil-wick while the boys were sleeping, knew nothing of the festival within the gates.

        It was late ere they would let him go. They were poor people, all of them; working for their daily bread; but if he could have eaten gold that night they would have found means to change their loaves to it, they were so proud of him--their little neglected, laughed-at waif and stray, to whom the grilli in the moonlit wheat had taught such sweet-toned singing.

        They forgot that they had been rough with him,--that they had kicked him about like a little lame dog--that they had said all manner of cruel things to him and of the man who defended him: those who do wrong can so easily forget. But neither did he care to remember.

        They were the people of the Lastra to him--the people of his home.

        That was enough.

        They would carry him into Sanfranco's house; they would pour forth the richest wine that the country could yield; they would all touch him, all

look at him, all have a word with him; they would come in one on another in an endless stream, with a ceaseless delight; they would pour question on question, wonder on wonder, and stand and look at him as if he were a young god come down on earth.

        "And to think if I had not let him have that fiddle so cheap, the world might never have heard of him--never!" said Tonino the tinman, looking in on the edge of the crowd, though he did not venture farther.

        For not only the fly on the spoke praises to itself for the speed of the wheel, but the stone that would fain have hindered it, says, when the wheel unhindered has passed it, "Lo! see how much I helped!"

        Signa, perceiving him in the dark without, looked over at him and smiled.

        He did not care to remember his hurts. He was happy, and men all seemed to him brothers in the sunshine of God's peace, like the saints in the Spanish Chapel where he had prayed that day.

        "When I was a little thing," he said to them,

"I dreamed of gates of gold for the Lastra here. Gates of gold I never can give. But, if all go well with me, I will live and die amongst you here; and you will make my grave on the high hills, and you will sing what I have written when you bury me."

        "Why does he talk of dying?" they said to one another. "His life is only just begun."

        But Signa did not hear them. He was looking down on them with a smile; while his eyes were wet with tears.

        He had looked like that when he had been a little child, and they had said, "Is it the angels he hears?--nay, it is only the crickets in the corn that are humming."

        It was late when they would let him go. Bruno had waited patiently, saying nothing to any soul, drawn back a little near the door, with the look of a great peace upon his face; but silent, because too proud and with too much scorn in him to say:

        "You see that I spoke truth. And this is no young god--this is only Pippa's son, whom you derided."

        The crowd went with him out by the sea gate,

and took leave of him till the morrow, kissing his hands and his clothes, and shouting and leaping around him, and bidding him be down at sunrise--all the tables of the town should be spread for him.

        He had refused to be taken homeward. He wished to tread with his own feet the lovely, familiar road. As the last of the throng left him, and Bruno and he were alone, in the moonless, sultry night of the hottest month of the year, the echo of the people's voices followed them, still singing the chaunt of the "Christians."

        "Fame has only the span of a day, they say," murmured the boy half aloud. "But to live in the hearts of the people--that is worth something."

        "They love you now. Ten years ago they beat you--ten years hence they will beat you again if the humour takes them," thought Bruno; but he said nothing. After all, he might be wrong.

        There was a little light in a little hut by the wayside. Bruno looked at it.

        "That is where Palma lives now," he said.

"The other house went with the garden. She works late to-night--there are so many boys."

        "I will give her what I have brought," said Signa, and he paused and knocked at the door. "It is I--Signa!" he cried aloud.

        The girl unbarred the door, and flung it open. She did not speak, but her great eyes were alight with a fire like the leaping of the dawn, and she trembled from head to foot.

        "It is I," said Signa, slipping into her hand a little packet. "Look--you must wear this to please me--to show you I did not forget. I will come and see you in the morning, dear. Good-night!"

        He kissed her cheek, and went away.

        Palma took the parcel to the light, and opened it; it was a string of carved coral beads and a cross.

        "And I am so ugly, now! oh, so ugly! Oh, how cruel God is!" she cried, in a passion of anguish, and dropped her poor brown head on her hands; her head that was like a boy's.

        She had never before thought it any pain to have given her brave black tresses to pay her

father's grave; only a duty, so simple and natural, that it was not to be thought twice about in any way, and never to be lamented with self-pity; but now she could have wept her very soul out to have lost her sole treasure, to be so unlovely, so absurd, so shameful, to have given up her one crown and veil of womanhood.

        "I am so ugly!" she moaned, sitting on the bare mud floor with the pretty coral necklace in her lap.

        It was all the reward that her sacrifice brought her--to know herself disfigured and discrowned, when Signa's eyes should fall on her with the morrow's sun.

        She had never thought about herself, never taken any count whether she were lovely or unlovely, ill or well: in her laborious life filled to the brim with work that was never done, there was no time for any such speculation; she toiled all the day long and half the night without joy or pause, or recompense of any sort; honest and pure and loyal to her task by sheer instinct, as birds are clean, or leaves are fresh; never before with any thought of herself, all her life being

merged in the lives she served; but now, for the first time, her heart cried out in sick rebellion.

        God had made her ugly--just as Signa came.

        He, unwitting, went on with Bruno up the sea-road where his mother had stumbled to her death. There was hardly as breath of air, even on the hills. After a while, having reached a height, they paused and looked behind them. It was all a great sea of darkness, fragrant, but solemnly dark, like a mighty grave.

        "And you love nothing but your music still?" said Bruno, suddenly. "Nothing? no woman? You would tell me?"

        "No woman, no!" said Signa; and he spoke the simple truth. Yet in the gloom of the night his face grew warm. He had loved no woman yet; but, in his visions of late, the angels that came to him had all women's forms and women's faces as in the visions of the Paradise on Orgagna's field of gold.

        As they stood and looked back into that soft impenetrable darkness, there came a fluttering line of light, which, undulating like a fiery snake,

stole through the shadow up and up and up towards the clouds.

        "What is that?" cried the boy, startled and unnerved after the homage and the wakeful fancies of the night.

        "They are the torches," said Bruno. "A hill burial--that is all. There are so many lights; it is some young thing dead."

        "The torches came to meet me in triumph an hour ago," thought Signa, and a shiver went over him, and he ceased to look back.

        The lights stole up the hillside towards some lonely tomb amongst the silence of the woods, then vanished, and all was dark.

CHAPTER III.

        "It is too magnificent for me," she murmured. "You know I am so poor always, and so ugly now; I have lost my hair."

        "Who would not love you more, dear?--knowing why you lost it," said Signa, kindly; for he knew the goodness of the girl, and was fond of her in his gentle way--only she never could understand anything, not knowing her letters

even, and being always at work like a little windlass that everybody's hand turns.

        But Palma shook her head.

        She did not know anything indeed, but the instincts of her sex moved in her and made her feel that no glory of a golden deed is so great a nimbus to a woman as the rays of a physical beauty.

        "Indeed, you are never ugly, Palma," said Signa, to console her. "Dear, you have straight features and such noble eyes; you cannot be ugly, ever. And for the hair, that will very soon grow, and you must wear the necklace on feast days when I am gone, to show that you remember me."

        Remember! Palma thought of the S. Cecilia hung up in the church above on the hill. She had meant to tell him it; she had dreamed always of leading him up there hand in hand, as they had used to go when they were children, and making him sit on the altar-steps where the jasper was, while she told him what she had done; but she was silent about it now that he was here. Someway she felt almost ashamed of it.

        He had made his own fame; he had won his own victory; he did not want her help or S. Cecilia's. Perhaps he would only smile, she thought. She was not sure of the great use of the picture; all in a moment she had lost her faith in it.

        He looked so full of grace, smiling there in the sunshine.

        She glanced up at him, feeling as if there were whole worlds of distance between him and her. She could not have done him any good with her prayers up there in the dark; she could not have been wanted. She would have liked to tell him, but she felt ashamed.

        "You work so hard, Palma," he said, leaning over the low stone wall.

        "Yes; but I have always done that. It is not new."

        "But the boys must help you, now?"

        "A little; but they eat more than they earn."

        "Did your father suffer much--dying?"

        "A great deal; it only lasted a day. He could not speak much, but he thought of

Gemma; he kept looking at that little Jesus in wax that used to be so like her. He has seen her now--in heaven."

        "You are always sure she is dead?"

        "Oh, yes! She would not have forgotten us so long as this, if she were living."

        Signa was silent. He knew that to those who go, forgetfulness is easy; to those who stay, impossible.

        "I never think she is dead," he said at last.

        "Why?"

        "Because she was so full of life; so sturdy, so mirthful; always in mischief too, and doing so well for herself: things like that do not die."

        "Everything dies if God will it," said Palma. "For me, I am sure, she would not have forgotten if she were living. Sometimes I pray to her to make me a little sign from heaven, but she never does."

        "She was like a cherub in heaven to look at," said Signa, who never quite had ceased to mourn his lost playmate or to reproach himself with her fate. After his music, he had most loved Gemma.

        "Yes," said Palma, and stooped down her head over her hoeing at the weeds; she felt so ugly with her short, ruffled, foolish, clipt curls, that made her feel like a shaven dog. She never had thought of her face before; of what it possessed or of what it lacked; but that morning, rising, she had looked at herself in the little square bit of mirror over the flour-bin, and had thought she was lean and brown and frightful.

        "I do not believe she is dead," said Signa, again. "Sometimes, in the strange cities, I looked about in the women's faces to see if there may be one that might be hers. She would not alter. I should know her."

        "You never will see her. She is dead," said Palma, with the obstinacy that is always in the peasant as in the mule.

        She worked on amongst her tomatoes, gathering the bright scarlet balls into a skip. She could not tell him about her S. Cecilia.

        He would only talk of Gemma all the while, if they were to go up there amongst the thrushes and the rosemary;--besides, the change that was in him she felt more acutely

than even Bruno had done. This beautiful young Endymion, whom the moon had kissed, could have wanted no help of hers. Her poor, little picture seemed to her so foolish, so humble, so small; the grace and greatness of his fame could not have grown out of her prayers in that little dark nook. All the year she had thought that it had, and had poured out all her heart in them. But now that she saw him, her hope seemed to her as stupid a thing as if a brown ant creeping by with a grain of corn had thought it filled the granaries of the world.

        She was ashamed of her little picture that she had spent all she possessed to hang up there by the altar-rail, with the ruby light of the stained glass upon it whenever the sun went west. She did not dare to ask him go up to the hill with her and see it.

        "I did what I could; but then he did not want anything done," she thought.

        "She is dull and morose; she works too hard, poor girl," thought he; and he moved away. "Good day, dear, for a little; I will see you before I go."

        "Go! --you go again then?"

        "Ah, yes! In a very little. It will be the autumn season soon. I go whenever the 'Actea' is played."

        Palma looked up at him; straight in his face.

        "And you are quite happy?"

        "Quite."

        "And you are really great?"

        "Men say so. I do not know. I will be greater if I live."

        "And Bruno lonelier."

        She wished the words, when they were said, unsaid. Signa's face clouded a moment.

        "That is not my fault," he said, slowly. "And no--perhaps he will not be;--when I am all that I dream of, and when I have gold in both hands, I will come back and live here on the hills, that I promise; and I will build a palace of marble that shall look east and west; and all the hungry shall be fed there, and all the footsore rest. And then, when there are any boys quite desolate, as I was, and dreaming beautiful things, as I did, and wanting help, and not knowing where to turn, then they will all come to me; and I will

teach them, and we will sing together, and they shall be happy, and we will give our lives for the world; and men will love us, and through us love God: it will be like the 'Angeli' of S. Marco dwelling together with music, with the roses round them, and the sky above!"

        He stopped; the cloud had cleared from his face; it was shining with a light that was sweeter than the sun's.

        He was only a boy still; and the world had not dimmed his dreams with its breath.

        Of all the innocent things that die, the impossible dreams of the poet are the things that die with the most pain, and, perhaps, with most loss to humanity. Those who are happy die before their dreams. This is what the old Greek saying meant.

        The world had not yet driven the sweet, fair follies from Signa's head, nor had it yet made him selfish. If he had lived in the age when Timander could arrest by his melodies the tide of revolution, or when the harp of the Persian could save Bagdad from the sword and flame of Murad, all might have been well with him. But

the time is gone by when music or any other art was a king. All genius now is, at its best, but a servitor--well or ill fed.

        Palma listened, looking up at that bright, strange light upon his face; not understanding at all with her mind, but wholly with her heart. The frozen pain in her melted.

        She put her full basket back into the house.

        "Will you come with me a moment?"

        "Where?"

        "To the old church, up yonder."

        "Yes, dear."

        She called to her little brother to mind the house, and took Signa up the narrow, winding paths, just trodden down in the grass by a few rare footsteps, going up amongst the vines and then amongst the olives, and then where the land grew wilder amongst the gorse. The vines were hung with grapes that touched them as they went; the wild peaches fell yellow at their feet; the blue radish-flower was in the grass like gleams of the sky reflected on the dew; big oxen, muzzled and belled, looked at them through the leaves.

        "It is so beautiful!" said Signa, mounting higher and higher into the tangle of green and the network of sunbeams.

        "Yes," said Palma. But she did not know it. She had not time. Amongst all its sad losses, poverty has none that beggars it more than its loss of perception.

        They reached the old church, brown and solitary, with a few cypresses near it, and round it the sheep grazing; it had once been the chapel of a great villa, of which there was nothing now left but roofless arches and a wall where the rains of five hundred winters had not quite washed away the frescoes.

        She took him in, and led him up to the pillar by the altar where the little picture hung.

        "I bought it; I put it there," she said, timidly. "Perhaps it has done nothing, you know; perhaps you do not want it;--but at least it could do no harm, and I have come and prayed here every little bit of time I had to spare. I am sure the saints love you--without that or anything--but it was all I could do. And when you were so far away--"

        Signa looked up at the column and understood it all. He stooped and kissed her, touched to the quick.

        "Ah dear!--how good to think of me. You bought it--you, who toil so hard? Oh, Palma! I will try and find Gemma for you;--I shall find her;--something tells me so."

        Palma sat down on the lowest altar step; she did not answer. If he had looked at her face he would have seen that it was very pale under the brown that the sun had scorched on it. But he did not look; he was looking up at the painted Sebastian on the roof, and thinking how bitterly Gemma had cried one day because he could not reach down the saint's golden arrows for her.

        The sheep bells tinkled; the smell of the rosemary was sweet on the air; a bird sang, sitting on the old tattered mass-book.

        "Gemma is in heaven," said Palma, and sat still and pale in the morning light.

        Gemma!--who had always been so much happier than she.

        "Perhaps I shall find her somewhere in the

great world," said Signa, softly. "And she will have suffered, perhaps, and sorrow have softened her and ennobled her--it does, they say--and made her soul as beautiful as her little body was. Think of that Palma! and then I would bring her home to the palace that I mean to build, and make her happy, so happy; and she would be in all my music, just as the sun is in all the flowers. Think of that Palma! Pray that it may come true. It would be like a story out of the 'Legend of Gold.'"

        Palma was still very pale.

        "You will see her in heaven," she said. "She was drowned in that sea, that I am sure."

        But Signa shook his head.

        "She is alive; that I am sure."

CHAPTER IV.

        Then he passed down into the city.

        He knew so little of it, scarcely more than if he had been a stranger. Bruno had held him back from it always.

        He strayed into the galleries, quiet and deserted in the strong August heats, and saw the face of the Samian Sybil and the beauty of the Venus of Titian.

        As he wandered down the corridor which holds the portraits of the artists painted by themselves, he paused before one which seemed to him, in a way, familiar. It was the head of a man still young; a head that had grace and power in it, but also levity and caprice. It was roughly painted in black and white.

        "Whose head is that?" he asked the custodian dozing in the sun.

        "A living painter's--one Istriel."

        "Of what country?"

        "France. He is a great man there. He did that for us by order of the King."

        "I have seen him somewhere; where does he live?" said Signa, and mused a little while; and then remembered the morning of the Feast of SS. Peter and Paul, and the gift of the Fair Christ.

        "He lives in France, I suppose," answered the other. "But I think he is a great deal in Rome. I think he works there a great deal."

        "What kind of things does he paint?"

        "Women, for the most part, I believe. There is a picture they talk very often of just now; you

can see a copy of it in the town: it is very fine--a woman."

        "A portrait?"

        "Oh, no; just a woman dancing."

        "I will see it," said Signa, and he went where the man directed him for sake of those two gold coins that had bought his Rusignuolo.

        "Who knows?" he thought, "without those forty francs I might never have known more of music than to thrum on a lute to the sheep."

        Who could tell? All Bruno's labour of eighteen years might have been of less use than two gold pieces tossed by a stranger.

        He found the place where the copy of the great picture could be seen; a copy made by the painter's pupils, and shown for a little while by his permission, the original being in Paris. It was a picture of which all the world had talked two years before, whilst Signa was buried under the dust of study, and the darkness of poverty, and the disbelief of men.

        The copy was alone in a small cabinet, hung with red, and lighted from the top; it was a full-

length form of a woman dancing--only that; on a sombre background of brown shadow.

        Was it so beautiful?

        He did not know. But he shaded his eyes as from too much sun. It dazzled him. The figure stood out form the darkness like a living thing; all the light was concentrated on the exquisite fairness and warmth of the supple body, on the head turned over the shoulder, on the upraised arms tossing castenets above; on the know of pomegranate buds above the ear; on the rounded limbs, lithe as reeds and white as snow; on the transparent scarf of scarlet, touched with gold, which was the only drapery. The figure bent a little backward, showing every curve and grace of it: the face was beautiful.

        It was called, with the arrogance of a genius that knew its hold upon the world, "A Sister for the Seven Dancers of Herculaneum."

        Signa stood before it blinded, stunned, confused.

        No living woman had ever moved him as this dancer did. He gazed and gazed till, as the passion of the Spanish love-song says, "his

heart's blood was drawn from him through his eyes."

        And yet the picture hurt him.

        Hurt him by the taint that there was upon its loveliness; as there is in that of the Venus Calipyge of Naples.

        An old man, looking at the picture at the same time, spoke of it.

        "Yes; it is a beautiful study," the stranger said. "I have seen the original. This is a fine copy. The artist has touched it here and there himself."

        "It is not a portrait?" said Signa, timidly. He could not bear to speak of the picture, and yet he wanted to know more of it.

        "Oh, yes, it is a portrait. Only you see that he has painted it in the old Greek manner--the feet off the ground, no sign of earth, indeed; the figure floating, as if she flew. Yes, it is drawn from life. A girl--a woman--whom they call Innocence, in Paris."

        "Innocence! And painted there!"

        The old man smiled.

        "Nay, Vitellius called his bear so. The

wild beast shamed it less than does the woman, perhaps."

        The next morning he said to Bruno,

        "I have found the name of the man who gave me that money in the Lastra. It is Istriel. You remember my losing the paper in the rushes as I ran."

        "What do you want with any man now?" said Bruno, jealously; "or with any man's help?"

        "Nothing, indeed; but I should like to see him."

        "I cannot see why you should think about him."

        "Perhaps I never should have got beyond my little lute but for him."

        Bruno gave an impatient gesture.

        "We are what we are," he said, with rough fatalism. "It is no chance wind that blows the notes into the nightingale's throat, and the screech into the owl's; all that is settled beforehand."

        Signa was silent. He did not say his thought aloud which was:

        "I wish to meet this painter, because I want to

know where he found her, or if he only fancied her--that 'Sister of the Seven Dancers.'"

        He said instead, "Come down into the city and see a picture of his."

        "I cannot to-day," said Bruno, "because there is so much to do. Watering alone takes six hours in this dry weather; but to-morrow, perhaps, I can."

        To-morrow he went. He did not know anything about any of the arts, but he was at home amongst them; they were familiar things to him: it is so with all his country-folk.

        He stood and looked at it for some time; then he laughed a little.

        "Yes; it is a beautiful--wanton."

        He had hit the blot on it.

        Signa sighed unconsciously and restlessly. The picture beguiled him, bewitched him, and yet hurt him.

        Bruno said, "Do not look at it too long; it will get into you--like marsh fever;" and took him away.

        When they were in the sun again in the streets, he added:

        "If your baby Gemma were alive, that is just what she would be like."

        "No! never!" said Signa, indignantly; he did believe she was living, but he looked for her always amongst the innocent maiden faces at mass in the churches.

        Bruno laughed a grim laugh.

        "Let us hope she is dead," he said. "Only the devil never cuts his very best flowers down early."

        Signa did not answer.

        "Your painter must be bred to spread the plague," said Bruno.

        Signa did not ask him what he meant.

        He went and found Palma.

        "You do pray for Gemma's soul?" he said to her.

        "Always," said Palma.

        "Well, pray more, dear. Perhaps she needs it, who knows?"

        "Oh, no; she is in heaven," said Palma. "Such a child--and Christ so good."

        "Well, never mind. Pray always."

        "That is all he thinks I am of use for, to

pray for Gemma's soul," thought Palma. But she reproached herself for the thought, as mean and base.

        She had never ceased to love Gemma and mourn her;--only she wished he would not talk of her, not so very much.

        Signa wandered about the woods alone, and saw always before him, in the golden fires of the summer day, "The Sister of the Seven Dancers."

        She banished the sweet veiled face of Lamia.

        "Your painter should cut off his right hand: it is like the sun; it breeds corruption," said Bruno, who knew the force of the flesh and the devil, and had in him a fierce, scornful wrath against that picture which had burnt his boy's soul with its impure sorceries.

        One day Lippo met him in the pine woods, no one being near.

        "Dear nephew," said Lippo, softly. "We cannot meet. Bruno is implacable. He will never forgive what he thinks an injury. See here:--I knew his little piece of land had to be sold to give your work a trial and a chance of favour. I

said to myself: 'I have a kind father-in-law and good friends, shall I offer to lend the money?' But then I bethought me, 'Bruno would only answer with a blow.' So when it was quite sure the land must go, I said to an honest soul in the city whom I could trust, 'Go, buy it in your own name, and make it over to me; so the thing shall not wound my brother, and yet the piece of ground not go away from the family.' So said, so done. Dear--I only hold the land in trust. I tried to explain to Bruno, but his head was full of traitors and of wrath; I could make no way with him. He would have brained me with his spade. But this I wish to say to you--my children are dear to me, but justice is dearer still. If ever you wish the land back again, I will sign it over to you--almost as a gift: I would say quite so; but, when one has so many mouths to feed, one is not altogether the master of one's purse. Dear--be quite sure of this: I bought it, hoping to please Bruno; never to spite and vex him, as he thinks. Christ knows there is no venom in my heart. The other night, when you had such a welcome I was

proud and glad; I should have come foremost amongst them, only Bruno is so violent, and I feared it might look time-serving. But, believe me, no one is prouder than I am, and Nita; she says fifty times if once, 'To think he is so great--the little drowned baby that sucked with Toto!' Dear--you have been made to think ill of us. It is a pity. And in your grand, famous ways in the future years you will not want us; that is true. Still, be sure our prayers go with you; and, though we are only poor folks toiling hardly in a little village, we shall not shame you, for we are Christians and we pay our way; and if you ever should desire back that little bit of land--well, I look on it still as yours, and I never let the interests of my children bar the road of justice. No, that were to serve them with very narrow sight and worldly selfishness. Bruno has misjudged me always. Well--the saints bore all evil and were patient. So must we. Dear--farewell. If ever you dare brave my brother's wrath, and will like to look in on us, you will find frank welcome. But perhaps I am not right to ask it. Your duty is to Bruno before

all things. Yes; to you he has been good. Farewell."

        And Lippo went away quite softly through the pines.

        Signa was moved. True, they had been unkind to him; but such wrongs fade fast in generous natures, and, where an impersonal passion reigns, personal injuries seem slight and are soon forgotten.

        Perhaps Bruno had been harsh and too swift in his ire, he thought regretfully. Bruno's error was too great haste of temper and strength of hatred; that all the country knew.

        "I wish they could be reconciled," thought the boy, and lingered on his way home wondering if there were any means to do it.

        He hinted at forgiveness that night to Bruno.

        Bruno set his heel down with a force that jarred the house.

        "I do forgive as much as can be asked of any man;--I let him be."

        Meanwhile Lippo went homeward to his house by Our Lady of Good Counsel, pondering whether he could not prevail on Baldo to help

him to acquire another acre or two of ground, quite near on the same hill, which rumour said would soon be in the market. Baldo had grown to have strong faith in the prudence and wisdom of his son-in-law.

        "You will let the boy have back the land at what you gave for it!" screamed Nita, when her husband told of her of the things he had said; for she was a rough, impetuous woman, of fierce temper, and could never see an inch where he saw a full mile.

        Lippo smiled, his gentle pensive smile.

        "Nay, dear; that is a question for the future. The children's interests must not be forgotten; that were not just to them; and land rises in value every day, and money gets more scarce."

        And he sauntered out into the warm, star-lighted streets.

        He liked his game at dominoes.

        "I have seen the dear lad," he said to Momo and Tonino and his other gossips. "I met him quite by chance. So tall as he is, and so graceful, and so like a young prince: one would not know him. His heart is full of love for us. He can-

not show it. No. He would come to us; but I said to him--I say always--'Your duty, before all else, to Bruno.' I must say it--knowing what I know. His duty is to him:--as Toto's duty is to me. Oh, yes. He is a noble lad: spoiled in much; yes, but of a good heart. Bruno has not done ill in letting him have the land's money for his opera; I know it has paid Bruno back thrice over. Bruno has a clear head and a keen eye. They know that in the Square of the Signorià. Poor boy! Well--I say poor--perhaps stupidly, but it does seem so. Parted from us all, and ruled by Bruno; and, like all people that have genius, a baby, a simpleton, a mere piece of wax--in worldly matters. All the country is ringing of him. It is a great thing to think: unless we had let him go the church functions and learn the plain-song and be so much with the sacristan in the organ loft, he might never have known all that there is in him; he might have been a little shepherd, barefoot on the hills--yes, still. Throw your bread upon the waters;--aye:--perhaps come back to your own mouth it will not; but you will be blessed

by it, someday. The dear boy!--no doubt in his great world he will forget us all, why not? We are peasants, when all is said; and he will go to palaces. But then the good that we have done to him keeps with us like a cypress bough that never withers and drives the evil spirits far away. Dear boy!--to think he is so great!--and will be rich too; if, at least, his gold be left him, and his career well managed. That is the only thing I fear. Bruno loves him--oh, surely, in his way. But then Bruno loves money too."

        And Lippo sighed, and piled the dominoes in a little heap absently, and with a sad, nervous gesture--thinking. The gossips shook their heads.

        Lippo was so just a man: that all the town knew. Of such men is the kingdom of heaven. To be sure his window had been dark that night when all the Lastra was rejoicing; but that had only been good feeling in him. He had not liked to seem to claim the boy's remembrance--when there was such great triumph too.

        "We may remind those who fail, of us," said

Lippo, with a gentle smile. "But we must be forgotten by those who succeed--if they choose it shall be so."

        "You are so good," said his neighbours; and began to mutter to one another that Bruno, when he had sent the boy to the great schools and sold the land for him, had only been sharper of sight and more prudent of forecast than ever--yes.

        And the Lastra was well content to think that, when it had welcomed so loudly the young hero of the Actea, it had left Bruno standing aloof, and had not noticed him--not even when Signa bade them.

        The lad stayed on till vintage came again and passed; correcting and perfecting his new music of the Lamia in the fresh hill air, in the sweet smell of the fruit; and now and then went down into the city, and stood and gazed at the dancer of Istriel, and drank in the impure sorcery of her, without knowing it.

        "Your painter is like the sun; he breeds rottenness from beauty," said Bruno; who knew the force of the flesh and the devil, as he

called it, and felt a sort of sullen scorn of this strange painter who spent his strength in giving enduring shape to the fleeting graces of wantons.

        To Bruno it seemed a poor thing to fill a man's life.

        Women were women--to be toyed with if you would; but to pass your life painting in their own likeness their wiles of a moment and their postures of pleasure!--that seemed to him poor pursuit enough. This painter was only a name to him, a vague shadow; but he felt a fierce wrath against him. But for the coins that had bought the Rusignuolo, who could tell?--Signa might have dwelled contented in the peaceful husbandry of the hills.

        For the iron was always in his soul. He was proud of his boy, and loved him, and knew that now Signa could never be other than he was; and so ceased to chafe at the unchangeable; and tried to make the best of an undesired destiny. But, like Palma, it was all in vain that he brought his thank-offering, that he prayed to his gods, that he said a thousand times, "I am glad."

        In his heart there was no gladness.

        In his heart he lamented still and rebelled.

        With the last day of vintage Signa spent his last hours on the hills.

        The Actea was being given at the theatre of Como, and he had to go thither, and thence to Milan, where its music was yet unknown.

        He had a sort of longing to buy that dancer of Istriel and take her with him, and look at her always; but it was impossible: despite his new-born fame and Lippo's fables he was poor; he made some money, but no more than was needed, for his costs of travel and his simple ways of living and the gifts that he loved to throw broadcast. He was famous, indeed; but he was only a boy, and had to deal with a shrewd world, and it cheated him. The world, like Lacedemonia, is fond of hounding into silence and exile its Timothei who dare to add new chords to its lyre of song; but it is unwise to do it, for its Timothei are so intent on stringing the lyre anew, and hearing the full, sweet sound of their fresh creation, that the world may empty their

pockets unfelt, as it will, and unchidden. Its Timothei are its golden geese--it should be content to pluck them; but it is not often so; seldom is it satisfied with doing less than what kills them.

        It was very early in the morning.

        There had been heavy rains at night, and there was, when the sun rose, everywhere, that white fog of the Valdarno country which is like a silvery cloud hanging over all the earth. It spreads everywhere and blends together land and sky; but it has breaks of exquisite transparencies, through which the gold of the sunbeams shines, and the rose of the dawn blushes, and the summits of the hills gleam here and there, with a white monastery, or a mountain belfry, or a cluster of cypresses seen through it, hung in the air as it were, and framed like pictures in the silvery mist.

        It is no noxious steam rising from the rivers and the rains: no grey and oppressive obliteration of the face of the world like the fogs of the north; no weight on the lungs and blindness to the eyes; no burden of leaden damp

lying heavy on the soil and on the spirit; no wall built up between the sun and men; but a fog that is as beautiful, for it has beams of warmth, glories of colour, glimpses of landscape such as the moon would coldly kill; and the bells ring, and the sheep bleat, and the birds sing underneath its shadow; and the sunrays come through it, darted like angels' spears: and it has in it all the promise of the morning, and all the sounds of the waking day.

        Bruno's dwelling was lifted out of it, but it spread everywhere beneath; and the tops of the highest hills seemed to ride on it like ships upon a sea.

        Signa paused and looked over the vast scene as he and Bruno came out into the air. He had to leave at eight of the morning for the northern lakes, trusting himself to that iron way and horse of fire which Bruno had never ceased to hate and to mistrust, through night and day for so many years he had heard the steam beast thunder dully through his valley, winding as the river wound.

        They came out of the house after their meal of bread, which was all they broke their fast with, and stopped by mutual impulse under the old mulberry-tree by the porch.

        Bruno had said nothing to dissuade him from departure. He had grown to see the necessity of their lives being perpetually asunder.

        Signa could only come to him now and then--that he saw; and the times of his coming must grow rarer and rarer, and the links of union between them fewer and fewer--that he saw too. He never complained. He hardly regretted. He had known that it would be so, when he had broken the Rusignuolo. It was a dull, ceaseless, unchanging pain to him, but he said nothing. What was done, was done.

        This young singer--this young hero--this young crowned dreamer of dreams, could by no miracle be brought back and be made into a peasant lad, and be contented with a labourer's lot.

        If he ever returned to live here it would only be because the world drove him back with a broken heart; therefore Bruno said, in his dark

corner in the church, to the unknown power that he worshipped: "Let him never be brought back--never."

        The world had his boy. Since the world would only part with him if it flung him bruised and ruined away,--let the world keep him.

        "After all it does not matter for me," said Bruno, and taught himself to think so.

        Only a vague fear, a shapeless anxiety, haunted him always. He knew too little of any life beyond that of his own country side to be able to go with Signa, even in fancy, into these strange new lines of his fate. He was too ignorant, and mistrusted himself too much, to be able to tell the lad what it was that he dreaded. But in his heart he was full of trouble.

        "All is well enough with him now," he thought. "But when the woman comes?"

        For Bruno thought that the great world, since it was made up of men and women, must have the same fatality in it as the life he knew.

        The woman makes or mars the man: the man

the woman. Mythology had no need of the Fates.

        There is only one; the winged blind god that came by night to Psyche.

        So much Bruno knew.

        A weight of longing and of warning was upon his heart. But he stood silent in the arched way of his house.

        The boy seemed now so much wiser than he; had seen so many cities and men; had sown the seeds of his young brain and made already harvest;--was great, though so young. What could he say himself?--a man who knew nothing except to drop the wheat grain into the earth, and wait for sun and storm to make it multiply?

        What came in his mind to say were a million confused things; he did not know how to sort them, and shape them into speech.

        At last he did say, with the heavy gloom of parting on him:

        "Woman is god or devil to man, as he to her. Dear, when you love a woman--tell me. Will you tell me that?"

        Signa smiled musingly.

        "Oh, yes! I love my Actea and my Lamia. They are the real and living women to me. The rest are shadows."

        "That will not last," said Bruno, curtly. "Your Actea and your Lamia will be the shadows soon."

        Signa shook his head.

        "Not to me. Mozart loved his wife; but it was not of his wife he thought when he was dying. It was of his requiem."

        "You speak like a child," said Bruno; and they were silent.

        It was of no use speaking: they did not understand each other. The boy knew the powers of art, of which the man was insensible. The man knew the powers of passion, of which the boy as yet was ignorant.

        Bruno saw in the future a fate that wrestled with him for the soul of Pippa's son. It wore to him the likeness of that "Sister of the Seven Dancers" of the city of ashes.

        To him she was a symbol: she haunted him; he hated her. She--or her likeness--would dispute the boy's life with him.

        As he had hated the sorcery of the Rusignuolo, so he hated the vision of the unknown woman. What use were the boy's promise, the boy's faith, the boy's foolish proud confidence in the empire on him of his dreams? Bruno knew well--a woman would look some day,--just look;--and all these things would be as vapours drifting before the break of day.

        "Love kills everything, and then dies itself," he said, bitterly. "Or, perhaps, it does not die: then it is a flame, always burning, burning, burning, till the body and the heart are cracked, empty, shrunken potsherds. That is love."

        Signa shuddered a little.

        "You frighten me," he said.

        "I wish I could," said Bruno.

        And he knew that he could not: that, say what he would, some single look from a woman's eyes would undo it some day. He had never thought about it till he had seen that Dancer with the pomegranate blossom, in the town; but now he knew--there would be a foe to him some day, that he would not be able to break under his foot, as he had broken the Rusignuolo.

        His heart was heavy, standing there in the white cold mists of the daybreak.

        To the boy, the future was a golden haze--a mirage full of fair colours--a certainty of national love and public praise, and sweet intoxication, and all the liberty of an untrammelled genius. To the man, the future was dark: he saw no way into it; he had not faith in it; he doubted the good faith of the world.

        No doubt it was because he was ignorant. He had told himself so; but he had no belief in this fair fortune blown from the breath of other men.

        "It is to plough and to sow in the sand-bed of the river," he said to himself. And it seemed to him that Signa mistook the shadow of a reed for the sword of fire of an archangel.

        "If your great world should turn against you, should tire of you--they say it is capricious--your heart will be broken," he said, abruptly, with his hand on the lad's shoulder.

        Signa looked up and smiled.

        "No; the world cannot hurt me. My music has gone down into the hearts of the people. It will live there. Nothing else matters."

        "But the world is changeable, I have heard."

        "Fashion is--the people are not. In Milan the other day they sang the same chants in the cathedral that St. Gregory composed five hundred years after Christ. Nothing can hurt me now. If the great world did not want me, I know my force now. I should go through the countries, teaching my songs to the people everywhere. Death itself would not hurt me very much, because, though dead--they might forget me quickly enough, no doubt--but the music would live, and my soul would live in it. What else do I want?"

        "I cannot understand," said Bruno. "You talk as if you had no body to be pained or pleased. One would think you were a spirit--to hear you. It is nonsense;--if one kill a nightingale with a stone, then the song is killed too."

        "Perhaps not," said Signa softly. "Perhaps a poet has passed and heard it, and sings the song over again to the world."

        But Bruno did not see what he meant.

        "One stones it, and it is dead; there is an

end," he repeated, with a sick, heavy sense of peril upon him--of what he did not know clearly; but it seemed to him that the boy walked with his head in the clouds and his feet in the quicksands.

        He could not help it.

        He could not guard Signa's steps, nor bend his eyes to earth. It was beyond him. He could only hope; and with Bruno, do what he would, his hope had always the drooped clipped wings of doubt.

        They stood silent together; while the sun, behind the sea of snowy mist, shone golden in their faces.

        "Dear," he said, at last, "you go away into a vast unknown world. I cannot help you, nor follow you; nor even warn you--not to do any good. I know the things of the soil, as well as any man; but nothing else. No doubt you go to greatness, having won it for yourself already. And you so young! And I suppose nothing else would ever have contented you; so, it is best so. But there are things, I think, that will go hard with you--one cannot tell; you have not suffered yet, and

you seem all mind, just as a flower is all bloom. That will not last: you will find the beast in you some day--even you. Dear, it is not for me to preach, or teach, or counsel anything. I have led a bad life often, and I know nothing. If I were to begin to talk, I might hurt you. One fears to handle your soul: it is like a white moth--to me. What I want to say is just this. You know I promised your dead mother. What one says to the dead, one must keep faith to, more than to the living. The living can avenge themselves, but those poor dead--Dear, will you remember? I want to meet your mother, face to face, on the Last Day; and to just say to her--'This is your boy; I have done my best by him; he comes back to you with a pure soul; I have given my life for his.' Will you remember? You are far away from me always now; much farther than by miles. I can do nothing--only hope and fear. If evil do assail you, think of that. Help me to keep my faith with Pippa."

        Signa heard him,--moved, subdued, perplexed.

        The great shadow of Bruno's doubt fell also upon him.

        Was there so much more peril in the world than he knew?

        He bowed his head.

        "I will try," he said, simply.

        Bruno thought, "He does not say--I will."

        They left the house, and went down through the wet woods and the clouds that floated on the sides of the hills.

        Before another hour, he was gone.

        Bruno stood a little while alone on the edge of the iron rails, listening to the distant thunder of the steam, as the last curl of the smoke disappeared in the windings of the valley. The fog had lifted and passed away. Mountain and river and vineyard and homestead stood out clear in the morning light; his own hill rose above them all,--the quarries shining in the sun, the bold pines piled against the brightness of the sky.

        "It is a good augury," he said, to himself.

        He tried to think so.

        He retraced his steps up the cliff road, and

went home alone, and yoked his oxen to the plough, and drove them up and down beneath the vines, as on the day when Pippa's body had drifted away on the face of the flood to the depths of the sea.

        "It is a good augury," he said to himself, as the glory of the morning spread over all the earth beneath him.

        But, though the sun shone, it seemed to him as if, on all the land and water, a great, empty, desolate silence had fallen.

        All was so still.

        He was alone.

        "The birds do not sing after vintage," he told himself; and tried to think that it was only that.

CHAPTER V.

        He had not thought to say a word of parting that morning; a kind, careless farewell, the night before, at the garden gate, when Bruno was by--that had been all.

        "Why do you cry, Palma?" said the youngest of her brothers, who was only twelve, and a cripple, with his small limbs mis-shapen and withered.

        "Do you ask?--with father not six months in his grave?" murmured Palma.

        Her heart smote her as she said it. She was lying to the child.

        She went about her daily work. It was for her as if she did it in the dark. But she did it, missing nothing--not even slurring anything. There was so much to be done, with all those five boys, and two only of them earning anything.

        Once in that long, laborious day she stole up-stairs, and looked at the necklace.

        "He was thinking that he was buying for Gemma," she said, as she looked.

        Later in the day, the eldest son of Cecco, the cooper, came and leaned over the wall as she worked. He was a cooper too, and a fine-built youth, and well spoken of in the Lastra.

        "You will not think of it, Palma?" he said to her, with his brown eyes wistful and sad.

        "You are good; but, no;--never!" said Palma, and went on weeding.

        What he wanted her to think of was himself. He did not mind her cropped hair, that would grow. He loved her industrious ways, her independence, her patience, her care of her brothers.

His father was well-to-do; he would look over the absence of a dower.

        "I shall not marry," said Palma, always.

        And when the young cooper said, for the hundredth time, "You will not think of it?"--in this warm, radiant, summer forenoon--Palma only said, "Never!" and went on, stripping her tomatoe bushes of their fruit, and hoeing between the lines of her newly set cauliflowers.

        She belonged, she said, to her brothers. So her living self did--her body and her brain, such as it was; and her strong, laborious, untiring feet and hands. But her heart belonged to two other lives--one dead and the other lost: the two lives that had been by hers in their childhood, in the moonlit lemon alleys of Giovoli, and the calm shadows of the old church of St. Sebastian.

        Signa and Gemma were always together in her thoughts:--one dead, the other lost.

        Cecchino, the son of Cecco, could give her a good house in the Lastra, and a full soup-pot always, and a good store of house linen, and

shoes and stockings, and a settled place in the world. Oh, yes; she knew. And his mother, who was a tender soul, had said, "He loves you, we will not mind about the dower, and you shall have my own self-spun sheets and my string of pearls." And they were all good--good as gold. And Beppo and Franco, who foresaw help for themselves in this union, upbraided her always, and railed at her when the bread was too stale, or the sour wine ran short.

        But Palma--though she knew, none better, the worth of bread and wine in this life, and the use of a strong arm to bar the door against the Old Man Poverty whom the devil has given leave to hobble perpetually upon the earth and creep in at all cold hearths--Palma shook her head, and would not even think of it, however Cecchino besought her.

        "I will not marry you; I do not love you," she told him. And Cecchino urged that marriage should come first, love last, with women.

        "Not so," said Palma. "That is to have the leaves bitter and the flowers leafless--like the endive. But it is not only that. I will not

marry. I will work for my brothers while they want it; and when they do not want me, I will go into a convent--and rest so. That is what I mean to do--Our Lady willing."

        And Cecchino could not change her.

        That was what she meant to do.

        Rest so;--a brown-faced, middle-aged woman, in a white coif, saying prayers in a little cell, on knees stiff from many years of toil, and going amongst the orphans and the poor, and tending dying souls--that was how she saw herself in the future.

        It did not appal her.

        Any thought of marriage did.

        In the convent she would be able to pray for Signa and for Gemma;--and then in heaven she might see their faces.

        Perhaps if she worked very hard and prayed very much, the Madonna might call her up quickly, and give her some grace of beauty, there, in heaven to be like them. Sometimes she hoped that, quite humbly; and never sure that she could merit it.

        In the twilight of this day--having laboured

hard, and seen her brothers come and go, and smiled on them, and forced a cheerful laugh for them, because a dull house was bad for boys, and apt to drive them to the wineshops and the lotteries--Palma stole up, foot-weary though she was, to the little church above the gardens of Giovoli.

        She carried her little crippled brother on her back, because he fretted if he were left long alone, and set him down where the last gleam of sun fell, and gave him a few pebbles to play with, which contented him, because he was not very bright of brain.

        Then she went herself and prayed in the nook by the column where S. Cecilia hung. She had lost faith in it, because he had seemed to have none. He had thanked her for her thought of him, but he had never seemed to think it possible that it could have helped him in any way to fame.

        "Keep him safe in the world, and let him meet Gemma in heaven," she prayed; and said it over and over again, in passionate reiterated supplication, clinging to the pillar with her arms wound

about it, and her forehead pressed against its cold grey stone.

        She prayed there till the moon shone through the stained window on to the broken jasper; and the little cripple cried because the air grew cold, and he could not rise to catch the glow-worm alight upon the altar step.

        She did not ask anything for herself.

        Hard work for ten or twenty years longer, and then rest--on the rough boards of a convent bed, and by the death agonies of beggars.

        That was her future.

        It did not affright her.

        "Only keep him safe on earth,--and her in heaven."

        That was all she prayed.

        She was sure the saints would hear her.

        She came out into the moonlight, carrying the lame boy on her back, and with the glow-worm like a little lamp within her hand. She was almost happy.

        Prayers, innocent and in firm faith, brought the benediction of their own fulfilment. She was sure of that.

CHAPTER VI.

        There was a storm in the air, but it had not broken. The great lake was curled by the faintest of breezes. There was the smell of oranges--leaf and flower and fruit--upon the air. Little boats went sailing through the shadows. The constellations of the Winged Horse shone clear high up in the heavens, though all round the horizon the skies were overcast--the Horse that has a star for his nostril, and that is plumed with strong desire, and that says to the poet, "Mount, and ye shall enter the realms of the sun with me, and ride also through the endless night where Persephone lies sighing."

        Signa--who did not know the stars by any name, but loved them as all dreamers do, and

held them in that wistful awe which was with him one half the terror of a child, one half the wonder of a thinker--was drifting in a little boat over the quietness of the water, and looking up at Pegasus.

        They were giving his music at Como; and they were about the bring the Lamia out in Milan. He went where his music went, as the way is in this country. But the small strife of the theatres, and the contentious and envious revilings, and the men and women with whom he had to do were all painful to him: too rough, too real, too coarse for him. He broke from them whenever he could, and they had ceased to try and alter him; he was no more fit for their world, they saw, than a young nightingale for a gay brawling street. They laughed at him--which he seldom knew, or knowing did not heed--and let him live in his own fashion as he liked, and made their money out of him, and said all genius was no better after all than an inspired idiotcy, and he was such a boy: only a little peasant still, though he had so sweet a face and so soft a grace.

        Signa was careless of them--utterly careless.

        He was so purely, naturally, innocently happy, that nothing could much stir or trouble him. All the noise around him was like the sound of a whirlpool to a child seated high on the rocks, who hears it, but only sees the silver seagulls and the sunshine. All the fret of their life could not hurt him; he saw only the dreams and the destinies of his own.

        What was beautiful to him in those long months of wandering were not the pleasures which his associates found; he hardly cared even for the praise that made his pilgrimages triumphs. What was beautiful to him were the changing mountains, the fresh wide waters, the unknown old cities, the treasuries of lost arts, the noble churches, the silent monasteries, the lonely little towns that had all some wonder of stone or of colour; the delicious free sense, as of a bird's flight, with which he was borne from place to place, filling his brain with memories, as a child its hands with flowers, thinking each new one found still lovelier than the last.

        He drifted now in his little boat: a fisherman rowed him from point to point along the shores.

He had talked to the man till they were both tired; going with the current, little movement of the oars was needful; the man sat mute, thinking of his haul of fish of that morning; Signa lay back looking up at the radiance of Pegasus.

        He did not know it as the constellation that belongs to all who dream of any art, but its stars shone down on him with a bright serene light, and he thought how they were shining too upon the water and the hills about his home.

        His heart always went back to the Lastra.

        His fondest fancy was of what should be the manner of his return to it; to raise works of marble like the palaces he saw, and live a great life in peace and pleasure, with a choir of young singers like himself around him, and the love of all the country with him.

        He was so young still; such dreams were possible to him. His hands were filled with the fast fading laurels of earth, but he believed them the changeless asphodels of heaven.

        The life of Rossini, had he seen it close, would have hurt him like a blasphemy.

        To Signa--reared in simple religious faiths, half pagan, half monastic, which were quite real to him--victory was obligation.

        God had given him his desire; so he thought. He said always to himself, "What can I render back?"

        In so many things he was only a little peasant still.

        The boat floated along, rocked gently on the liquid darkness.

        He watched the stars, and dreamed, and dreamed, and dreamed, and seemed to see again, white upon the shadow, a statue he had seen that day at noon: the Love and Psyche of Canova.

        Canova--whose soul was dead when he moulded the lascivious charms of the Borghese Venus and the poor vulgar graces of the Dancing Girls--has put all his soul into this marble.

        For one moment, in his vision of the face of Love, he has reached the height where the Greek sculptors reign alone.

        In the face of Love there is the very heaven of passion--all its longing, all its languor, all its ineffable abandonment and yearning, all its ab-

solute oblivion, which makes it live only in one other life, and would let the earth dissolve and the heavens shiver as a burnt scroll, and take no heed, so that "only from me this be divided never."

        The boy had watched the statue long, with a strange sense of something missed in his own young years--something unknown; and like a hot wind over him had come the memory of the dancing girl of Istriel.

        He had hated that memory, yet there it came.

        Her face effaced the softer face of Psyche: Psyche, who is not worthy Love in the marble, as in the fable of the lamp.

        Floating along the shores of the lake he dreamed of the statue; only, do what he would, instead of Psyche he saw always the form of the dancer of Istriel. And the boy in his ignorance smiled, remembering the warnings of Bruno.

        "What does he know?" he thought, "living on his hill there. All men love--the lowest and the highest. One would be greater surely in all ways, not lesser--if one loved."

        For he did not know that Love will only reach

his height by treading all other things beneath his foot. He did not know that Love lends a fire divine to human souls only by burning all their world to waste.

        The boat paused at a bend in the shore, grated a little, and then was fastened to the land.

        Signa leapt out with the fresh cool leaves smiting him sweet blows upon his eyes and mouth. They had reached the little village where he liked to sleep and see the dawn break over the lake better than to remain in Como, where the singers drank, and laughed, and quarrelled until daybreak, and thought it ill of him unless he joined them.

        The boat went on to where the rower lived;--Signa strolled a little on the shore. It was not late, and he could see the white-walled cottage where he had house room amongst its orange-trees and myrtles, and he wished to watch the storm which, country-born and hill-bred as he had been, he knew was rising, though the lake was still.

        The village stood on a small creek: its woods and thickets went to the water's edge; it was a

wilderness of roses. It had a little white church, with one bell; several huts and houses of peasants and fisherpeople; and a few villas that were sought by summer idlers and by rich strangers towards the early autumn time.

        Signa walked on the edge of the water, his feet in roseleaves and fallen jessamine flowers: the shore was all a garden, wild or cultured according as the proprietor of the soil were poor or rich.

        He wandered along till he lost sight of the roof of his own little dwelling, listening to the soft lapping of the little waves upon the stones and the splash of distant oars.

        All at once he paused. He saw a statue in the water through the leaves--at least, the thought it so.

        It was the white figure of a woman, half clothed in close clinging draperies, which with her right hand she held upward to her knees; with the other hand she was gathering her hair into a great knot; her naked feet were in the shining water; her arms were bare too. She was quite still at the moment he saw her first, as though awaiting

something; the moon had come out of a heavy cloud, and fell on her, so that she looked a piece of sculpture, white as Psyche was.

        Then, tired of holding up her hair, she let it fall in a sudden shower, thrust the boughs of the wild roses apart, and stepped from the pebbles and the water on the shore. The movement brought her face to face with Signa.

        He saw she was no statue, but a woman; young and living, and impatient of some delay; dripping with water, which ran from her hair and limbs in silvery rain, and made her white thin garments cling to her. She had been bathing in the solitude of her gardens, into which he unwittingly had strayed.

        Signa stood still and gazed at her, too much amazed, too startled, too confused, to move or speak. His face flushed with shame--shame for himself and shame for her.

        "Forgive me," he murmured; but his feet were rooted to the ground, his heart beat so loudly it seemed to him to fill the air. The woman--all white there, with her shining limbs and shining hair tangled in the thickets of the

roses, with her wet small feet like ivory upon the moss--he thought it all a dream.

        She had started, too; then she looked at him with a smile slowly uncurving the rose leaves of her close pouted lips. She was in no wise embarrassed. She stood looking at him with the moonrays full upon her, making the water-drops like pearls.

        Then she laughed.

        A pretty laughter pealing through the garden silence, she shook her hair over her like a veil, her white arms and bosom shining through it as through a golden network, like cobwebs in the sun.

        Another woman ran quickly up to her with breathless excuse for absence, holding a scarlet shawl in her outstretched arms. She let it be wrapped round her, and turned away, looking at Signa through her hair.

        "Stay there," she said to him; "stay there, and string a romance upon me. I am wet--I was bathing. I will come back. Stay there!"

        He stood there, stupefied and entranced, as she had bidden him; not sure, still, whether it were

a woman indeed, or only a statue that his fancy warmed.

        He was not sure that all was not a trick of his own imagination, and of the sudden shining of the moon out from the dark night.

        He stood, bewildered and breathless, listening with throbbing pulses to every noise in the leaves and on the water. If she were a living creature, she had bade him wait.

        For his life he could not have moved away.

        He felt hot with shame for her if she were indeed a living thing.

        Strange stories he had heard in the old folk-lore of the Lastra--where people believe in many an eerie phase of the night side of nature--came over him with a shiver. What human thing could have looked half so white? or could have borne his gaze without a blush? or could have laughed straightly in his face as she had done?

        His brain was giddy, his heart beat high;--he glanced up to find his stars, but they were gone--the clouds had covered them. The rose-boughs rustled, the grasses seemed to thrill, the shallow water shimmered at his feet. Would she come

back, or had she only mocked him? Was she like the beautiful white woman who cannot forget her crimes, but wakes from her grave and strays all night through the great forsaken gardens of the Medici? He shuddered as he thought--he who had been reared where the people believe in the ghostly wanderings of Bianca Capella.

        He longed for her back