"I have a dear friend who, when he was no older than you are now, went to Italy. He spent his best years in a delusion, for he thought then he might become a great painter. His character, such as it was and is, turned to the things of good report; he was an orphan, with a competence; but he had had no home, and no moral training. Being something of a recluse, he developed late and slowly. At a time when the storm-clouds in most young men's lives are lifting, his were surcharging themselves, and getting ready to burst. On his thirtieth birthday, in Ferrara, he--" "In Ferrara, yes!" broke the eager interruption. "He persuaded another man's wife to run away with him. She was a peasant, very young and innocent, with a sweet pensive Perugino face; she had been his model, up to her marriage with Niccola Potenza." There was a sharp affirmative breath from the listener. "Niccola Potenza was a cooper, with good prospects. He was considered quite a match for the girl; but he turned out to be dull, silent, and preoccupied. Little Agata was romantic; and her thoughts ran easily back to my friend. The fault was, assuredly, all his. He thought that he loved her, and so, indeed, he did; although he loved better, alas, the adventure and the rebellion. At any rate, he took her away boldly from her husband and her babes, and set up life in his old studio, in Florence. The cooper, sworn to revenge himself, had nearly hunted my friend down, when on Easter Day he fell from a crowded and festooned inn-balcony, and broke his thigh. Somehow, after that, his fury failed him; and he sank, under his misfortune, into a sort of apathy. Things went wrong also with the lovers. Agata kept only for a while her soft, joyous, docile ways, and then grew restless and wretched, with the canker of a good heart spoiled, which nothing on earth can cure. She would spend hours in the chapel near by, her face covered, thinking and weeping; and then she would go back to her little household tasks, and move about in my friend's sight, her pale penitent face driving him wild more effectually than any audible reproach could have done. Of course he saw what was in her soul: the struggle between her foolish passion for him, and mortal home-sickness for the inner peace which had attended her old honorable life. He, on his part, resented the moral awakening in her, and stamped down both her conscience and his own. Against the voice within which bade him, since he had done her an irretrievable wrong, to take the legal burden of it upon himself, and make her his wife in America, arose his tyrannous social cowardice. He dared not; he had a depraved but intelligent dread of discord and incongruities. And so, as many another man as weak has done, he served his æsthetic sense, and threw honor to the winds. He was never, I think, wilfully unkind to Agata; his selfishness would seem to me now less diabolic had he tried to estrange her from him. But as soon as