could do it. But no. I think she wrote it herself. I recollect now that she is always at her best after she has made some mortifying blunder."
He sent a reply immediately:
"I will go away to-day, Laura, as you request. It is the only way in which 1 can prove that I am sorry for having spoken so to you yesterday. Of course I didn't know that the servant was there. I shall write you and keep you constantly informed of my whereabouts, and 1 hope that you will soon recall me."
She watched with a smile as he was driven away, herself hidden by the window-curtain. He looked up earnestly before giving the order to the coachman, as if hoping for a sign; but there was none. She was glad to get rid of him. A bitter aversion, born of distrust and mortification, had taken possession of her heart, and with it a burning desire to inflict on him a wound as scathing as that from which she suffered. The truth had not disturbed her so long as it was not mentioned; but put into words it was unpardonable.
Rosina, returning from the town, found her mistress still smiling as she gazed down the avenue after the carriage.
"The Suor Benedetta does not know just where a letter would reach the signorina," she said, "but she will find out from Fra Antonio."
"I shall have it all my own way, Rosina," the duchess said triumphantly. "The duke will not come back here this summer. I don't care if he never comes back. I don't wish ever to see him again!"
CHAPTER VII.
A LETTER.
During the very afternoon and hour in which her affairs were being discussed by the Cagliostros in their garden in Sassovivo, Aurora and her friends were in one of the carriages of a very leisurely Spanish railway-train moving through a hemisphere of color for which even Italy bad not prepared them.
The richness of Italian color is a soft richness; the terrors of Italian scenery are, one might say, domestic terrors. It is a feminine beauty, that storms at you sometimes, but takes care to do so gracefully. But in Spain there are true masculine landscapes,—views from which its grand old warriors may have caught something of their stern and noble chivalry. Where Italian scenery is spiteful, Spanish scenery may be cruel; where Italian color is pretty, charming, and exquisite, Spanish is sometimes ardently gorgeous. Italy gives you an aloe in an earthen vase; Spain shows you long straggling hedges of aloes walling in its fields and soaring far above your head with their great green blades. Italy gives you lovely orange-groves,—you may even see them growing to a noticeable length; Spain sends you rolling for miles on her railroads through a world all oranges. Their flossy green, thickly studded with the Hesperian fruit, shuts you in; the grass underneath those lofty boughs is strewn with gold; oranges are heaped on the platforms and in the storehouses like stones for building; you may lean from a second-story window and break a green twig with a great, soft, heavy orange on it. Italy has large olive-orchards climbing on isolated or clustered hills, and streaks of olives running through her landscapes; Spain stretches the dull smoky green over fenceless plains that the eye can scarcely traverse, and up the hills and mountains, till you see nothing but olive-trees from the centre to the horizon-rim all round the circle. Besides, in Spain the soil is sometimes as brightly colored as its marbles; and where the turf is freshly turned you see fields of red, and golden fields, and fields of deep brown red- or gold-tinted.
Aurora examined the new olive plantations as she went along. Instead of the slender plumes of Italy, these were miniature trees, quaint little things, set each in its small hollow in the brown earth, and sending each a shadow much
