Yes, she knew that she was morbid, that she had taken to brooding upon melancholy memories, that she was cultivating sadness. Alone in the olive wood, watching the evening light change and fade, and the shadows steal slowly from the valley and the sea, while memory recalled words that had been spoken in that narrow pathway, among those grey old trees in the light and shade of evenings that seemed ages ago, she had a feeling that was almost happiness. It was a memory of happiness so vivid that it seemed the thing itself. She had been very happy in those tranquil evenings. She knew now that she had begun to love Mario Provana many days before his impassioned avowal had taken her by storm. His eloquence, his power of thought and feeling, had made life and the world new. She "saw Othello's visage in his mind." His rugged features and his eight-and-forty years were forgotten in the charm of his conversation and the rare music of his voice. The world of the scholar, of the thinker, and the poet, had been an unknown world to the girl of eighteen, whose poor little bit of flimsy education had been limited to the morning hours of a Miss Greenhow at a guinea a week. He opened the gate of that divine world and led her in, and they walked there together; he charmed by her freshness and _naïveté_, she dazzled by his wealth of knowledge and his power of imagination. Not even her poet father could have had a wider knowledge of books, or a greater power of thought, she told herself; which was a concession to friendship, as she had hitherto put her father in the front rank of those who know. She looked back at those innocent hours, when he who was so soon to be her husband was only thought of as her first friend. She looked back to hours that seemed to her to have been the happiest in all her life. Yes, the happiest; for happiness is sunshine and calm weather, not fever and storm. There were other hours more romantic and more thrilling, but agonising to remember--sensual, devilish. Those hours in the woods had been serene and pure, and she had walked there with the heart of a child. How kind he had been, how kind! It was the kindness in the low, grave voice that had made its music: only the kindness of a friend of mature years interested in her youth and ignorance, only a grave and thoughtful friend, liking her because she had been loved by his dead daughter. That is what she had thought of him for the greater part of those quiet hours. Yet now and then she had been startled by a sudden suggestion. She did not know, but she felt that he was her lover. * * * * *