me, which is the chief one for a wife, and must smooth the way for all that is necessary."
The colonel had perhaps never heard St. Augustine's "Love God, and then do as you please;" but he was right in believing that real love includes devotion and obedience. His mistake was in believing that the lady was capable of real love.
Then, when honorable retreat was no longer possible for him,—if a foolish and pernicious promise of marriage is binding in honor,—he met Aurora Coronari in circumstances calculated to call out the character of each and give each a peculiar interest in the other; and he said to himself, with a shock of bitter regret, that here was a woman in whom all virtues were combined and who did not need the rein of love to guide her in the right way. Here was a woman who would chide her husband with a sweet austerity if he should err, yet charm him like a siren. If he were a soldier, she would send him out to battle with a smile on her lip, and keep her tears to shed when praying heaven for his safe return.
He saw her but twice, and the second time she sang her first song at his request, and on the subject chosen by him,—she who was now a famous poetess,—and she broke an olive-twig with him in token of friendly remembrance. Then he went away and fulfilled his promise of marriage.
There had been no need of struggling to banish the image of the young poetess from his mind, or of accusing himself because it lingered there. She was not a passion: she was a vision, and a vision of all that was fair and noble and inspiring. To remember her was to remember virtue and religion.
For his wife, she had long since ceased to possess, to his mind, even the one virtue of loving him, for he no longer called by the name of love that bold and egotistical caprice to which he had been sacrificed. Beyond a certain point, which most people would call innocent, he did not accuse her; but he knew that there were other gentlemen who were much better able to amuse her than he was, that their admiration was pleasing to her, and that she sought it. If he had refused her on that fatal day which bound him forever away from the highest delight which earth can give, she would have wept a little, raved a good deal, and consoled herself with some one else.
"Well," he said to himself, "pazienza!" And he had been patient. Not a harsh word or unkind act had ever expressed his often bitter sense of the harm she had done him or the disgust with which she sometimes inspired him. He dreaded the first outbreak, for he felt that, the ice once broken, there would be no more secure peace between them. She still stood a little in awe of him. His perfect courtesy had kept her so. She wished him to believe her to be as true a lady as he was a gentleman, and, the mask once off, she might not put it on again.
"I wish that one of us could be muzzled," he thought one afternoon as he stood in the garden in Sassovivo watching her take her tea, which she had chosen to have brought out under the palms. "I wouldn't much care which it was. If she goes far on this track, I cannot help putting my foot down."
He stood leaning against one of the trees, and she sat opposite him in an arm-chair, with a little tea-table at her elbow. He thought her dress too short and the position of her feet unladylike. It struck him that she looked like a pretty contadina.
"How odd you never told me that the old castle up there is ours!" she said.
"It isn't ours to use," he replied. "It is quite hors de combat. Who has been telling you about it?"
She thought best not to let him know the source of her information, for he could frighten Suor Benedetta, and the duchess had discovered her to be a precious magazine of gossip and scandal carefully sugar-coated with piety. "I don't recollect," she said carelessly. "I saw so many people yesterday. I think
