Below the terrace where I stood, lay the sea, where blue faded to green, and green to opal, melting into one deep far-stretching mystery of purple light and banks of golden cloud. Palaces and domes and tapering spires shone white against the dark background of distant mountains. Suddenly the music of many bells rung out on the still air, their chiming softened by distance into low faint sweetness. They were the bells of the stately marble city that shone so fair across her gleaming bay. The first bell-notes were taken up and echoed by the bells of chapels in villages along the shore; of convents hidden away in country dells and valleys, till the air was full of lingering prayerful sound. Through it, through the magical Italian twilight came the woman I loved. She came and stood beside me, looking across the water to where Genoa's palaces glimmered against the sky; but I do not think she saw or thought of them. There was a dreamy look in her eyes, a cold, set weariness about her mouth, which is only seen in those whose thoughts have drifted far from where they stand. 'Are you tired of this place?' I at length ventured to ask her. 'Not particularly,' she answered; 'you know I never care much where I am.' The words sound petulant; but said as she said them, they were only weary. I should have been glad if she had ever shewn impatience; anything rather than the cold quiet which ever lay upon her beauty like a pall. At first, in my triumphant happiness at having won her promise to be my wife, this coldness had not chilled me--as it sometimes did now--to the heart. I so longed, so hungered for a word of love, for a tender look. All her stately beauty would soon be mine, and it seemed still as far from me as ever. We leaned on the low parapet of the terrace, while the music of the bells died away, till only the slow beating of the waves broke the stillness. It was an hour of wonderful peace and beauty, yet a strange sense of unrest took possession of me, and jarred the music of the waves and the restful quiet of the twilight. Standing there close to her, with the certainty that soon she would be my own for ever, a vague thrill of fear came over me, a fear lest all this feverish joy of knowing she was mine, might vanish away, and leave me a lonely mortal. This love for her had become to me an all-absorbing passion; and yet she never for one moment allowed me to think that my love was returned. Perhaps it was the might of her beauty that filled my senses; yet I have seen beautiful women since, and had seen them before I first saw her on the walls above the old Etruscan gateway at Perugia. * * * * *