last she was beginning to place her voice somewhat more approximately where it ought to be placed. It was as if the fierce little black and white man had been softened by the spirit of Christmas, of which those blue-cloaked pipers were at once the heralds and the ambassadors with their bourdon rising and falling upon the mandarin-scented air. Absence from home at this season did not fill Nancy with sentimental regrets. Since Bram died Christmas had not been a happy time for her, so intimately was its festivity associated with that dreadful night at Greenwich four years ago. She welcomed and enjoyed the different atmosphere of _Natale_, and after so many grimy northern winters these days of turquoise, these dusks of pearl and rose, these swift and scintillating nights. On the anniversary of Bram’s death she drove out to Posilipo and sat on a rock by the shore, gazing out across the milky cerulean waters of the bay. For all the beauty of this classic view she was only aware of it as one is aware of a landscape by Poussin or Claude, about whose vales and groves and gleaming temples no living creature will ever wander. The dove-coloured water that lapped the rock on which she sat, the colonnade of dark-domed pines along the brow of the cliff, Ischia and Capri like distant castles of chalcedony, Vesuvius in a swoon of limpid golden air—all without Bram was but a vanity of form and colour. The thought of how easily he might have been preserved from death afflicted her with a madness of rage. Indifference to the beauty of her surroundings was succeeded by a wild hatred of that beauty, so well composed, so clear, so bland, and so serene. But for the folly of one incompetent and unimaginative fellow man he might have been sitting beside her on this rock, sitting here in this murmurous placidity of earth and sea and sky, gazing out across this crystalline expanse, his hand in hers, their hearts beating together where now only his watch ticked dryly. Nancy longed to weep; but she could not weep in this brightness. Yet she must either weep or fling herself from this rock and sink down into the water at her feet, into that tender water with the hue and the voice and the softness of a dove. She let a loose stone drop from her hand and watched it sink to the enamelled floor of the bay. How shallow it was! She should never drown here. She must seek another rock round which the water swirled deep and indigo-dark, water in which a stone would flicker for a few moments in pale blue fire and be lost to sight long before it reached the bottom. Nancy left the rock where she had been sitting and tried to climb upward along the cliff’s edge in search of deep water at its base. And while she climbed her clothes became scented by the thickets of rosemary. There appeared to her distraught mind the image of Bram as Laertes and of the actress who had played Ophelia saying to him, “_There’s rosemary, that’s for