"If I have not spoken of her, it has been because I was under the impression that you had tacitly forbidden me to do so," John informed her.

"So I had," she admitted. "But I find that there is such a thing--as being too well obeyed."

She brought out her last words, after the briefest possible suspension, hurriedly, in a voice that quailed a little, as if in terror of its own audacity. John, with tingling pulses, turned upon her. But she, according to her habit at such times, refused him her eyes. He could see, though, that her eyelashes trembled.

"Oh," he cried, "I love her so much, I need her so, I suppose I shall end by doing the dishonourable thing."

"Did you ever tell her that you were Lord Blanchemain's heir?" she asked.

"I never thought of it. Why should I?" said John.

"When you were bemoaning your poverty, as an obstacle to marriage, you might have remembered that your birth counted for something. With us Austrians, for example, birth counts for almost everything,--for infinitely more than money."

"I think," said John, as one impersonally generalizing, "that a fortune-hunter with a tuft is the least admirable variety of that animal. I wish you could see what beautiful little rose-white ears she has, and the lovely way in which her dark hair droops about them."

"How long ago was it," mused she, "that love first made people fancy they saw beauties which had no real existence?"

"Oh, the moment you see a thing, it acquires real existence," John returned. "The act of seeing is an act of creation. The thing you see has real existence on your retina and in your mind, if nowhere else, and that is the realest sort of real existence."

"Then she must thank you as the creator of her 'rose-white' ears,"

laughed Maria Dolores. "I wonder whether that sunset has any real existence, and whether it is really as splendid as it seems."

The west had become a vast sea of gold, a pure and placid sea of many-tinted gold, bounded and intersected and broken into innumerable wide bays and narrow inlets by great cloud-promontories, purple and rose and umber. Directly opposite, just above the crest-line of the hills, hung the nearly full moon, pale as a mere phantom of itself.

And from somewhere in the boscage at the garden's end came a lool-lool-lool-lioo-lio, deep and long-drawn, liquid and complaining, which one knew to be the preliminary piping-up of Philomel.

"If some things," said John, "derive their beauty from the eye of the beholder, the beauty of other things is determined by the presence or absence of the person you long to share all beautiful visions with. The sky, the clouds, the whole air and earth, this evening, seem to me beauty in its ultimate perfection."

Maria Dolores softly laughed, softly, softly. And for a long time, by the marble bal.u.s.trade that guarded this particular terrace of the garden, they stood in silence. The western gold burned to red, and more sombre red; the cloud-promontories gloomed purpler; the pale moon kindled, and shone like ice afire, with its intense cold brilliancy; the olive woods against the sky lay black; a score of nightingales, near and far, were calling and sobbing and exulting; and two human spirits yearned with the mystery of love.

"My income," said John, all at once, brusquely coming to earth, "is exactly six hundred pounds a year. I suppose two people _could_ live on that, though I'm dashed if I see how. Of course we couldn't live in England, where that infernal future peerage would put us under a thousand obligations; but I dare say we might find a garret here in Italy. The question is, would she be willing, or have I any right to ask her, to marry me, on the condition of leaving her own money untouched, and living with me on mine?

"Apropos of future peerages and things," said Maria Dolores, "do you happen to know whether she has any rank of her own to keep up?"

"I don't care twopence about her rank," said John.

"Do you happen to know her name?" she asked.

"I know what I wish her name was," John promptly answered. "I wish to Heaven it was Blanchemain."

Maria Dolores gazed, pensive, at the moon. "He does not even know her name," she remarked, on a key of meditation, "though he fears," she sadly shook her head, "he fears it may be Smitti."

"Oh, I say!" cried John, wincing, with a kind of sorry giggle; and I don't know whether he looked or felt the more sheepish. His face showed every signal of humiliation, he tugged nervously at his beard, but his eyes, in spite of him, his very blue blue eyes were full of vexed amus.e.m.e.nt.

The bell in the clock-tower struck eight.

"There--it is your hour for going to Annunziata," said Maria Dolores.

"You have not answered my question?" said John.

"I will think about it," said she.

IV

Annunziata's delirium had pa.s.sed, but in spite of all their efforts to persuade her not to talk, talk she would.

"This is the month of May, isn't it?" she asked, next morning.

"Yes, dear one," said Maria Dolores, whose watch it was.

"And that is the month of Mary. San Luca ought to hurry up and make me well, so that I can keep flowers on the Lady Altar."

"Then if you wish to get well quickly," said Maria Dolores, "you must try not to talk,--nor even to think, if you can help it. You know the doctor does not want you to talk."

"All right. I won't talk. A going clock may be always wrong, but a stopped clock is right twice a day. So stop your tongue, and avoid folly. My uncle told me that. He never talks."

"And now shall you and I imitate his example?" proposed Maria Dolores.

Her lips, compressed, were plainly the gaolers of a laugh.

"Yes," said Annunziata. "But I can't help thinking of those poor flowers. All May flowers are born to be put on the Lady Altar. Those poor flowers are missing what they were born for. They must be very sad."

"This afternoon, every afternoon," Maria Dolores promised, "I will put flowers on the Lady Altar. Now see if you can't shut your eyes, and rest for a little while."

"I once found a toad on the Lady Altar. What do you think he was there for?" asked Annunziata.

"I can't think, I'm sure," said Maria Dolores.

"Well, when I first saw him I was angry, and I was going to get a broom and sweep him away. But then I thought it must be very hard to be a toad, and that you can't help being a toad if you are born one, and I thought that perhaps that toad was there praying that he might be changed from a toad to something else. So I didn't sweep him away. Have you ever heard of the little Ma.s.s of Corruption that lay in a garden?"

"No," said Maria Dolores.

"Well," said Annunziata, "once upon a time a little Ma.s.s of Corruption lay in a garden. But it did not know it was a Ma.s.s of Corruption, and it did not wish to be a Ma.s.s of Corruption, and it never did any harm or wished any harm to any one, but just lay there all day long, and thought how beautiful the sky was, and how good and warm the sun, and how sweet the flowers were and the bird-songs, and thanked G.o.d with all its heart for having given it such a lovely place to lie in. Yet all the while, you know, it couldn't help being what it was, a little Ma.s.s of Corruption. And at the close of the day some people who were walking in the garden saw it, and cried out, 'Oh, what a horrible little Ma.s.s of Corruption!' and they called the gardener, and had it buried in the earth. But the little Ma.s.s of Corruption, when it heard that it _was_ a little Ma.s.s of Corruption, felt very, very sad, and it made a supplication to Our Lady. 'I do not wish to be a Ma.s.s of Corruption,' it said. 'Queen of Heaven, pray for me, that I may be purified, and made clean, and not be a Ma.s.s of Corruption any longer, and that I may then go back to the garden, out of this dark earth.' So Our Lady prayed for it, and it was cleansed with water and purified, and--what do you think the Little Ma.s.s of Corruption became? It became a rose--a red rose in that very garden, just where they had buried it. From which we see--But I don't quite remember what we see from it," she broke off the pain of baffled effort on her brow. "My uncle could tell you that."

Afterwards, for a few minutes, she was silent, lying quite still, with her eyes on the ceiling.

"Why do sunny lands produce dark people, and dark lands light people?"

she asked all at once.

"Ah, don't begin to talk again, dear," Maria Dolores pleaded. "The doctor will he coming soon now, and he will be angry if he finds that I have let you talk."

"Oh, I will tell him that it isn't your fault," said Annunziata. "I will tell him that you didn't let me, but that I talked because it is so hard to lie here and think, think, think, and not be allowed to say what you are thinking. Prospero asked me that question about sunny lands a long time ago. I've been thinking and thinking, but I can't think it out.

Have you a great deal of money? Are you very rich?"

"Darling, won't you please not talk any more?" Maria Dolores implored her.