“Oh, no. Parliament is a talking machine, wound up for all time. There’s no stopping it. These demagogues delude the masses by telling them that labour is the parent of wealth.” “I wonder if it isn’t?” mused Don Riccardo, lighting a cigarette. “Admitting it,” Tarsis retorted, “should the parent try to strangle its offspring? That is what these rainbow statesmen would do. They proclaim capital a despoiler of labour, yet keep their addled wits at work concocting schemes for the despoiling of capital. Take, for example, the Employers’ Liability bill--simply a device to plunder the employer under the cloak of law.” “I agree with you fully!” exclaimed Donna Beatrice. “I have heard of that iniquitous measure.” “But capital will not flinch,” pursued the man of millions. “It has a mission to redeem Italy by making her industriously great. On that mission it will press forward in spite of the demagogues, and bestow the blessing of employment on the poor in spite of themselves.” Don Riccardo yawned behind his coffee cup, but his sister brought her hands together in show of applause, and uttered a little “Bravo!” For Hera, she gave no sign. When Tarsis was talking, somewhat heavily, with his air of a rich man, his small, keen eyes looking into hers now and then, she wondered what her life would be with such a companion; but when they were moving homeward past the darkened shop windows of Corso Vittorio Emanuele, out through the Venetian Gate, and speeding in the moonlight of the open country, her reflections took a different cast. Her soul cried out to be free, and to the cry for freedom came an answering call to revolt. In the afternoon of the next day--the one before that set for the wedding--she had her horse saddled, heedless of Donna Beatrice’s warning that the skies foreboded a tempest. A few paces from the villa gates she heard at her back the sound of galloping hoofs, and presently Mario was riding at her side. “I crossed the river yesterday,” he said, “in the hope that you would ride, but met--disappointment.” “I am sorry,” she told him, simply, yet he understood that she meant, “It must not be.” “Frowning skies invite us at times,” he went on, “and by that I made my hope in to-day.” “Yesterday was beautiful--far better for a ride,” she admitted, as if to tell him that he had divined the truth. For a while they rode in silence. They passed the ruins of a monastery known of old as the Embrace of the Calm Valley. It had been one of the many religious settlements in the domain of the Barbiondi in the days of their power. “I went there yesterday,” he told her, “and found a strange sympathy in its desolate picture.” “To me it always has been dear,” Hera said. “My mother loved the old place. Often we went there and gathered the wild roses and camellias that grew in the cloister.”