There she knelt on a praying chair before a small alcoved altar with tall wax tapers, and remained a long while. She was disturbed by a sudden ringing report below; it was Cesare practising with a dueling pistol. Lavinia remembered, from laughing comments in Florence, that her husband was an atrocious shot. The sound was repeated at irregular intervals through an unbearably long morning. Gheta, she learned, had refused the morning chocolate and, with her maid, had collected and packed all her effects. Lavinia had no desire to see her. The situation now was past Gheta's mending. After luncheon Lavinia remained in her room, Nelli departed for Naples and Cesare joined her. It was evident that he was greatly disturbed; but he spoke to her evenly. He was possessed by an impotent rage at his unwieldy body and clumsy hand. This alternated with an evident wonderment at the position in which he found himself and a great tenderness for Lavinia. At dusk they were in Lavinia's room waiting for a message from Naples. Lavinia was leaning across the marble ledge of her window, gazing over the dim blue sweep of water to the distant flowering lights. She heard sudden footsteps and, half turning, saw her husband tearing open an envelope. “Lavinia!” he cried. “There has been an accident in the elevator of the Grand Hotel, and Mochales--is dead!” She hung upon the ledge now for support. “The attendant, a new man, started the car too soon and caught Mochales----” She sank down upon her knees in an attitude of prayer, and Cesare Orsi stood reverently bowed. “The will of God!” he muttered. A long slow shiver passed over Lavinia, and he bent and lifted her in his arms. TOL'ABLE DAVID I He was the younger of two brothers, in his sixteenth year; and he had his father's eyes--a tender and idyllic blue. There, however, the obvious resemblance ended. The elder's azure gaze was set in a face scarred and riven by hardship, debauch and disease; he had been--before he had inevitably returned to the mountains where he was born--a brakeman in the lowest stratum of the corruption of small cities on big railroads; and his thin stooped body, his gaunt head and uncertain hands, all bore the stamp of ruinous years. But in the midst of this his eyes, like David's, retained their singularly tranquil color of sweetness and innocence. David was the youngest, the freshest thing imaginable; he was overtall and gawky, his cheeks were as delicately rosy as apple blossoms, and his smile was an epitome of ingenuous interest and frank wonder. It was as if some quality of especial fineness, lingering unspotted in Hunter Kinemon, had found complete expression in his son David. A great deal of this certainly was due to his mother, a thick solid woman, who retained more than a trace of girlish beauty when she stood back, flushed from the heat of cooking, or, her bright eyes snapping, tramped with heavy pails from the milking shed on a winter morning.