"Dear Elena?"

"Ye-s."

"Do you think it will seem long to wait until he comes?"

"Don't talk like that, Donna Roma."

"Why not? It's only a little sooner or later, you know. Will it?"

Elena had turned aside, and Roma answered herself.

"_I_ don't. I think it will pass like a dream--like going to bed at night and awaking in the morning. And then both together--there."

She took a long deep breath of unutterable joy.

"Oh," she said, "that I may sleep until he comes--knowing all, forgiving everything, loving me the same as before, and every cruel thought dead and gone and forgotten."

She asked for pen and paper and wrote a letter to Rossi:

"DEAREST,--I hear the good news, just as I am on the point of leaving Rome, that you have returned to it, and I write to ask you not to try to alter what has happened. Believe me, it is better so. The world wants you, dear, and it doesn't want me any longer.

Therefore return to life, be brave and strong and great, and think of me no more until we meet again.

"You will know by what I have done that what you thought was quite unfounded. Whatever people say of me, you must always believe that I loved you from the first, and that I have never loved anybody but you.

"You were angry with me when we parted, but more than ever I love you now. Don't think our love has been wasted. ''Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.' How beautiful!

ROMA."

Having written her letter, and put her lips to the enclosure, she addressed the envelope in a bold hand and with a brave flourish: "All'

Illustrissimo Signor Davide Rossi, Camera dei Deputati."

"You'll post this immediately I am gone, Sister," she said.

Elena pretended to put the letter away for that purpose, but she really smuggled it down to the Major, who despatched it forthwith to the Chamber of Deputies.

"And now I'll go to sleep," said Roma.

She slept until mid-day with the sun's reflection from the white plaster of the groined ceiling of the loggia on her still whiter face. Then the twelve o'clock gun shook the walls of the Castle, and she awoke while the church bells were ringing.

"I thought it was my dream coming true, Sister," she said.

The doctor came up at that moment in a high state of excitement.

"Great news, Donna Roma. The King...."

"I know!"

"Failing to form a Government to follow that of the Baron, appealed to Parliament to nominate a successor...."

"So Parliament...."

"Parliament has nominated the Honourable Rossi, the King has called for him, the warrant for his arrest has been cancelled, and all persons imprisoned for the recent insurrection have been set at liberty."

Roma's trembling and exultant eyelids told a touching story.

"Is there anything to see?"

"Only the flag on the Capitol."

"Let me look at it."

He helped her to rise. "Look! There it is on the clock tower."

"I see it.... That will do. You can put me down now, doctor."

An ineffable joy shone in her face.

"It _was_ my dream after all, Elena."

After a moment she said, "Doctor, tell the Prefect I am quite ready to go to Viterbo. In fact I wish to go. I should like to go immediately."

"I'll tell him," said the doctor, and he went out to hide his emotion.

The Major came to the open arch of the loggia. He stood there for a moment, and there was somebody behind him. Then the Major disappeared, but the other remained. It was David Rossi. He was standing like a man transfixed, looking in speechless dismay at Roma's pallid face with the light of heaven on it.

Roma did not see Rossi, and Elena, who did, was too frightened to speak.

Lying back in her bed-chair with a great happiness in her eyes, she said:

"Sister, if he should come here when I am gone ... no, I don't mean that ... but if you should see him and he should ask about me, you will say that I went away quite cheerfully. Tell him I was always thinking about him. No, don't say that either. But he must never think I regretted what I did, or that I died broken-hearted. Say farewell for me, Elena. _Addio Carissima!_ That's his word, you know. _Addio Carissimo!_"

Rossi, blinded with his tears, took a step into the loggia, and in a low voice, very soft and tremulous, as if trying not to startle her, he cried:

"Roma!"

She raised herself, turned, saw him, and rose to her feet. Without a word he opened his arms to her, and with a little frightened cry she fell into them and was folded to his breast.

[Illustration: WITH A FRIGHTENED CRY, SHE WAS FOLDED TO HIS BREAST.]

IX

It was ten days later. Rossi had surrendered to Parliament, but Parliament had declined to order his arrest. Then he had called for the liberation of Roma, but Roma had neither been liberated nor removed. "It will not be necessary," was the report of the doctor at the Castle to the officers of the Prefetura. The great liberator and remover was on his way.

At Rossi's request Dr. Fedi had been called in, and he had diagnosed the case exactly. Roma was suffering from an internal disease, which was probably hereditary, but certainly incurable. Strain and anxiety had developed it earlier in life than usual, but in any case it must have come.

At first Rossi rebelled with all his soul and strength. To go through this long and fierce fight with life, and to come out victorious, and then, when all seemed to promise peace and a kind of tempered happiness, to be met by Death--the unconquerable, the inevitable--it was terrible, it was awful!

He called in specialists; talked of a change of air; even brought himself, when he was far enough away from Roma, to the length of suggesting an operation. The doctors shook their heads. At last he bowed his own head. His bride-wife must leave him. He must live on without her.

Meantime Roma was cheerful, and at moments even gay. Her gaiety was heart-breaking. Blinding bouts of headache were her besetting trouble, but only by the moist red eyes did any one know anything about that.