"Marvellous woman!" and there was bitterness in his tone--"But women are all amazing when you come to know them! In love? in hate, in good, in evil, in cleverness and in utter stupidity, they are wonderful creatures! And you, amica bella, are perhaps the most wonderful of them all! So kind and yet so cruel!" "Cruel?" she echoed. "Yes! To me!" She looked at him and smiled. That smile gave such a dreamy, spiritlike sweetness to her whole personality that for the moment she seemed to float before him like an aerial vision rather than a woman of flesh and blood, and the bold desire which possessed him to seize and clasp her in his arms was checked by a sense of something like fear. Her eyes rested on his with a full clear frankness. "If I am cruel to you, my friend"--she said, gently, "it is only to be more kind!" She left him then and went out. He saw her small, elfin figure pass among the chains of roses which at this season seemed to tie up the garden in brilliant knots of colour, and then go down the terraces, one by one, towards the monastic retreat half buried among pine and olive, where Don Aloysius governed his little group of religious brethren. He guessed her intent. "She will tell him all"--he thought--"And with his strange semi-religious, semi-scientific notions, it will be easy for her to persuade him to marry the girl to this demented creature who fills the house with his shouting 'There shall be no more wars!' I should never have thought her capable of tolerating such a crime!" He turned to leave the loggia,--but paused as he perceived Professor Ardini advancing from the interior of the house, his hands clasped behind his back and his furrowed brows bent in gloomy meditation. "You have a difficult case?" he queried. "More than difficult!" replied Ardini--"Beyond human skill! Perhaps not beyond the mysterious power we call God." Rivardi shrugged his shoulders. He was a sceptic of sceptics and his modern-world experiences had convinced him that what man could not do was not to be done at all. "The latest remedy proposed by the Signora is--love!" he said, carelessly--"The girl who is here,--Manella Soriso--has made up her mind to be the wife of this unfortunate--" Ardini gave an expressive gesture. "Altro! If she has made up her mind, heaven itself will not move her! It will be a sublime sacrifice of one life for another,--what would you? Such sacrifices are common, though the world does not hear of them. In this instance there is no one to prevent it." "You approve--you tolerate it?" exclaimed Rivardi angrily.