And yet how much better it would have been for him than for Pandolfini! Diana could not but think, with impatient regret, as she looked at them all, playing their little parts round the table, where they were never to sit again. Sophy would have made the curate a very good little wife. She would have led him insensibly down from those unattainable wishes which held him suspended between earth and heaven, and brought him back to the calm delights of the parish, which was his natural sphere and hers. They would have harmonised by infallible instinct and power of natural attraction, after perhaps a little interval of difficulty. But Pandolfini! what link could there be between the little English clergywoman who would have been so useful in a parish, and the grave Italian whose habits were as alien to hers as his race? Poor Pandolfini in these few weeks had ceased even to be an Anglomane. He had gone back upon his native habitudes, upon his old relations; he had turned even his English books, in temporary disgust, out of their places. Fortune had dealt with him hardly, turning his preferences--the tastes which he had cultivated with a certain pride--into weapons of his downfall. Diana did not know all this, as she allowed herself to fall back into a review of all that passed after her guests were gone on that last evening. She was going away alone as she had come. All that had happened since her arrival here had passed over her without touching her. As she had come, so she was going away. The lamps were burning low, the soft night air was blowing in gratefully at the windows. The great picture of the Count dei Sogni, which had hung over her so long, seemed to look mildly, regretfully, half reproachfully at her through the gloom. He, too, poor Pandolfini, was of the Sogni: and she herself, and all the chances of this strange mortal life, what were they but _Sogni_ too? “We are such stuff as dreams are made of,” said Diana softly to herself, the tears coming to her eyes as she stood there alone in the great dim room, the curtains swaying softly behind her in the air of the night, and dim reflections showing all about like ghosts, repeating her tall white figure in the old dim mirrors. It had been nothing but a caprice on her part to come here--a mere fancy, without any seriousness or purpose in it. If she had but stayed at home--gone on upon her quiet round in her own sphere, where her duty was! Why was it that this whim; of hers should have brought a cloud upon the life of a good man? Life seemed to melt away and resolve itself into shadows, through those tears of visionary compunction that were in her eyes--a vain show, a phantasmagoria, momentary and delusive, strong gleams of light and rolling darknesses in which no meaning was. The vague whiteness that moved in spectral distance in the mirror far away from her at the end, of the room, far-off reflection of her own solitary figure, seemed to Diana as real as herself.