te CHANDOS. Padre Giulio will be so wretched! What will he think? Let me go ; pray let me go. " " Impossible; you would go to your certain death. I could not venture myself in such a night: you hear the hurricane? You must remain with me." " With ' ou?" sho repeated, under her breath. "Surely: I would not let a dog leave my roof in such weather as this. Besides, you are miles higher on the slope here than Fontane; the return to the village would be impossible for those far hardier thanyou." She looked at him with a wondering awe; he seemed to her such an emperor as Marcus Antoninus, who had laid down his pomp and come to dwell a while like other men. The deep-blue, weary, brilliant eyes that gazed on her made her think of the serene, imperial eyes or Augustus. "I am a total stranger to you, it is true," he said, gently, misinterpreting her silence; "but you are not afraid to remain in my house? I am only here for a villégiatura, and the place is desolate enough, but it will at least give you shelter." She lifted her head with the proud grace that would have paled and shamed the grace of many royal women. " Afraid ? Afraid of you ! What could I fear? You saved my life; it is yours to command. All is—I can- not thank you enough." The words were very touching in their liquid Tus- can, in their complete innocence, and in their perfect trust. " You have nothing to thank me for; a mule-driver or a charcoal-burner must have done for you what I did," he answered her, his voice unconsciously soften- ing. "And now go to rest; you want it. I will send the women to you, and they shall remain in your chamber; for you are not well enough to be left alone." " Ah, eccellenza, how good you are I" she murmured. A few years older, and she would have been grateful to him in silence, better knowing the motive of his words. " But indeed I am strong now; we, below Val- lombrosa, have the strength of the mountain-air, and —shall I not trouble you with staying here?" " Far from it; you bring your own welcome, like the birds that come and sing under our windows. Good- night, poverina, and sleep well." He held his hand out to her; she was but a child to him, and a child who had been sheltered on his breast through the driving of the storm. She stooped with the exquisite softness of movement of Southern women, and touched the hand he gave her, lightly and reverently, with her lips. " I would thank you, eccellenza, but I cannot." She did thank him, however, better than by all words, with that hesitating touch of her young lips, with that upward glance of her eyes, languid with sleep and fatigue, yet lustrous as the Tuscan skies by night—eyes that seemed to him to have some story of his past in their depths. Then he summoned the women to her. peasants who dwelt in the villa, and she left him. He, having surrendered to her, though she knew nothing of it, the only habitable chamber that the half- ruined villa afforded, stretched himself in the warmth of the pine logs or. the wolf-skins strewn before it. She had brought back X him, why or whence he could not tell, memories that he would willingly let die—memo- ries that, through the length of weary years, burned still into his heart with unutterable longing, with in- tolerable pain. In the loneliness of the old classic hall, in the leaping light of the pine flames, throngs of shadowy shapes arose around him—the shapes of his past, summoned by the light of a child's smile. She meanwhile lay wakeful, yet dreamy, gazing out at the unfamiliar chamber and the swaying figure of the peasant-woman keeping watch over her and nod- ding in her sleep. Her thoughts were steeped in all the wonders of legendary lore, and she fancied some enchantment had been wrought in her since, out of that awful forest-darkness, she had been brought to this charmed stiUness in which only one remembrance was with her, the remembrance of the musing, lustrous, weary eyes that had looked so gently on her, of the voice that had soothed her terror and her pain with an accent softer than she had ever heard. She thought of him, and thought, as one other had once done before, that he was hke the Poet-king of Israel, but having known the bitterness of abdication, having known the ingratitude of the people. Then her musing became a dream, and, with a smile upon her lips, she slept under a stranger's roof till the tempest had passed away and the dawn was bright. As she awoke, the morning had risen. The sun broke in full glory over a splendid mass of purple cloud and tumbled storm-mist that glowed in magnificent color beneath the newly-risen rays. The earth laughed again even amidst her ruin—her ruin of crushed olive-buds, and uprooted saplings, and trees rent asunder, and nests flung down, with the young birds kiUed, and the mothers flying with piteous cries over the wreck; but the wheat-sprouts were too low to be harmed; the vines, though they trailed and hung helplessly under the dead weight of rain-drops, were still only in blossom; the watercourses made the wilder, merrier music, tilled to overflowing, and laying in swathes the ran k grasses of their beds ; the mules began to patter over the broken paths, picking their careful way over the dislodged boulders of rocks and the deep channels of brimming brooks. Beneath Vallombrosa the morning was fair and sun-lightened again, deadly though the tempest had been over-night, and rough work of destruction through it had wrought. With the sun she rose, her youth, like the youth of the spring and the earth, the brighter for the storm and the dan- ger gone by. There was the flush of waking childhood and of past sleep upon her cheeks, and her eyes had the gladness of a wondering dream in them, as she found her way, marvelling if she dreamed a fairy-tale, down some broken marble steps and out into the air. CHAPTER III. The full light poured into the open loggia before the half-ruined courts and halls of the Latin villa. Within, the one spacious chamber, with its frescoes and the mosaics, its books and scrolls, was bare enough. But the world of blossoming spring, of morning mists, of lavish foliage that opened out before it, rr,ade ample amends for any poverty and decay of the interior; and it was perfect for a villégiatura, ttiis deserted place that Roman pomp had once filled in Augustan days. In this loggia, reading, her host sat—a man no longer young, though as yet there was no silver amidst the fair and golden length of his hair; a man of a grave grace, of a serene, meditative dignity of look and of movement that had to it something that was very ' weary, yet something not less grand, nor less royal: he might have been a king in purples rather than what he was—an exile, and poor. The book was open upon his knee, but his eyes were not upon it for the moment; they were resting on the gardens without—gardens wild, forsaken, uncultured, but only the more beautiful for that, with dark waters winding under laurel-thickets, and green cistus, and ilex, and pomegranate, and Banksia roses growing at their will, and, all ivy-coiled and covered, broken frag- ments of arches and statutes and fountains. What he watched in them was the passage of the young Tuscan flitting through them with the freedom of a chamois in her step, and all the languor of a dew-laden flower in her loveliness. Sixteen years beyond the Appenines bring woman- hood; they had brought it to her in the loveliness nature had dowered her with, but in all else she was young as a child—she who had never wandered from the chest- nut shadows of her village, who had but dimly heard of another vast world beyond the beech-woods, who had known no friends but the birds who sang to her, who had known no pleasures but to watch a blue-warbler shake his bright wings in the myrtles, or to look deep down into the heart of a passion-flower and build a thousand fancies from its mystic burning hues. She was a child with the beauty of a woman; there could be no greater peril for her. He thought so as he saw her in this deserted garden. Art had no handling with her; the pure hill-air of Tus- cany had made her all she was; and she had the abandon and unconsciousness of some rich-plumaged bird, now floating softly through tbe sunlight, now Earising on the wing, now alighting to drop down in appy rest in a couch of feathery grasses. He gazed at her as she wandered through them, that exquisite ease in her step which many a royal woman has not, which a contadina may have balancing on her dark imperial head a pannier of watermelons. The lizai ds did not hurry from her, but watched her with curious eyes; the timid hares let her stoop and stroke them ; the old owls blinking in the ivy let her lift her hand and touch their crests; the wood-doves flew about her and pecked the buds from the boughs she held up to them. She bent over the black swollen water, and saw her own reflection laurel-crowned as the branches met above her head; she gathered the lilies of the val- ley, the buds of Banksia roses, and the young green ivy-blossoms, and crowned herself with them till the wreath was too heavy and shook all her glistening hair downward in a shower of gold, like a picture of Flora. Then, lastly, she sank to rest on a gray rock of fallen sculpture, the crown of flowers still above her brow; and after the glad, thoughtless pastime of a child, the proud and profound sadness that usually in repose was on her face succeeded it with a charm not the less great because so sudden. It was like the sudden fall of evening over the bril- liance and the glow of her own Tuscan landscape. As he saw it, he left the loggia and went towards her. She did not hear his step till he had approached her close; then she sprang up with the swiftness of a fawn, and with words of gratitude made only softer by the awe of him which lent her its delicate coyness. " I have been watching you for the last half hour, Castalia," he said, gently. " I am glad you could find such companions in my flowers and my birds; there is little else here fit for your bright youth." She colored under his gaze, and rait her hâ„_L_ "~ hurriedly to remove the dew-laden w;reath of bud and blossom ; she had forgotten it till his speech brought it back to her thoughts. He put out his own hand and stayed her. " Not for worlds ! I wish a Titian lived to paint you! you look like a young priestess of Flora. But, tell me. what spell have you that tames the Uzards, and stiUs the hares, and brings ah the birds to your hand?" «She lifted to him her musing eloquent eyes, grave as a child's when he pauses to think. " I do not know, eccellenza, unless—it may be be- cause I love them so well," His face grew a shade darker and yet softer; her words recalled the fond belief of his own youth. " You think love begets and secures love? I thought so once." " And was it not so?" " No; but—that knowledge should not kill love in us; there is much that is worth it, if there be much that is not. Because a viper turns and stings you, it would be wild vengeance to wring the wood-pigeon's neck." He spoke half to his own thoughts, half to her; she regarded him with a reverent, grateful, wondering gaze; in her little beech-forest nest of Fontane she had never seen anything like him. She who had known but one bent old priest, and brown, brawny muleteers and vin- tagers from whom she shrank as the white sea-swallow shrinks from the hard beak and cruel pursuit of the kestrel, thought almost he must be more than mortal. "I ought to leave you, 'lustrissimo?" she said, hesi tatingly. " I have troubled you so long." " Do you wish to leave me?" Her eyes opened more lustrous than ever in their sur- prised negation. "Wish? oh, no!" " Well, do not leave me yet, then. Come within, and let me see, though no Titian, if I can paint you with your crown of flowers. Your Padre Curato will feel no anxiety; I sent a messenger to him to say you were here." The gravest contrition stole over her face; she looked penitent as a cMdden child. "Oh,'lustrissimo! I had forgotten him. How un- grateful, when he is so good! How selfish one grows when one is happy]" Tho naïf confession amused him. " Then are you happy with me?" ' Excellenza," she said, under her breath, "it seems to me that I have been happier than in aU the years of my life." The reply pleased him. He had always loved to see happiness about him. " I am glad it should be so. And do not believe that happiness makes us selfish; it is a treason to the sweet- est gift of life. It is who» it has deserted us that it grows hard to keep all the better things in us from dying in the blight. Men shut out happiness from their schemes for the world's virtue; they might as weU seek to bring flowers to bloom without the sun " He spoke again rather to his own thoughts than to her, but she understood him. This young Tuscan, lost amidst the chestnuts beneath Vallombrosa, hid in her the heart of a Heloïse, the mind of a Hypatia, though both were in their cMldhond yet "Eccellenza," she said, hesitatingly, "that is true. If we keep light from a plant, it will grow up warped, When they condemn, do they ever ask if what they condemn had a chance to behold the light? Perhaps— perhaps if my mother had been happy she would not have been evil, as they call her?" The color burned hotly in her face, but her eyes were raised in wistful entreaty to him; it was but very vaguely that she understood the shame that she was made to feel was on her birth, but very dimly vhat shs comprehended some vast indistinct error with which her dead mother was charged. The question touched him with great pity. " Poverina," he said, caressingly, " do not weary your young life with those subtleties. You do not know that error lies at all upon your mother's history; who can, since you say that history is wholly unknown- even to her very name? It may be that the thing the world—your little woodland world, at least—blames in her was some unrecognized martyrdom, some untold unselfishness. At all events, be she what she will, you are stainless and blameless; all you need seek is to be so forever." She looked at him with a look of passionate, of intense, yet of restrained feeling, which told him now well she would love some day, and how bitterly she would suffer. "I thank'you, eccellenza," she said, her voice very low» " more for those noble words than for the life that yoir saved me." The brief answer was very eloquent—eloquent of her nature and of her gratitude. He said no more, but led her within to the old hall, only fit for a summer resi- dence for an artist, or a scholar sufficiently content with its classic charm and forest wildness to bear its scant accommodation. An easel stood before the open colonnade facing the gardens; he paused before it, and glanced at her, A lovelier theme never lurred any painter's brush, with the fresh crown of lilies and rose- buds and light-green blossoms of ivy shaking their dew upon the gold-flaked shower of her hair. He looked at her, then he threw aside the colors he had taken up. " Twenty years ago I could have given your picture there," he said, half wearily. "Now I have not the heart to paint you, my fair child: I have not the great inspiration—youth. " Twenty years ago he would have found no hour more beguiling than that spring morning with the young Tuscan, bringing the bloom of her beauty and of her crown of flowers out on the canvas ; now it only recalled to him all he had lost. A shadow stole over her eyes; he saw it, and turned back to the easel. "Are you disappointed, poverina t" She looked beseechingly in his face. " I never saw any paintings except those in our Uttle chapel." "No? Well, then, I will try and give you your desire." He took the colors and brushes up again, and, stand- ing before the easel, sketched her as she leaned against; one of the pillars of the colonnade, the rich glow and warmth of her young face but the brighter for the whiteness of the lilies and the deep green o the leaves that circled her hair. He had both the skill and th£ habit of Art; and the impassioned brilliance of her beauty, with the coronal of blossoms weighting her forehead with the weight of all diadems, rose gradually under his hand out of the sea of brown opaque gloom on which it was painted. The hours passed, and the pic?--------~y; it beguiled him for the time of heavier cares, t..,vi won him out of deeper thoughts; yet ever and again, as he lifted his eyes and glanced at her, the weariness which had made him turn from the taste came over him again. He thought of so mairy golden hours, when faces as fair had bloomed to fresli l