“Now, yes. Most of them, you can see, are persons who in health are accustomed to work, and not at light employment. They belong to the class who can rest without starving only when they fall sick and go to a hospital. Most of those patients on the lawn are done with the doctor and the nurse. Time, fresh air, good nourishment, and rest are their needs. In a few days they will be dismissed as cured. The demand for beds is pressing. Their room in the wards is wanted. They must go. They will not be strong enough to do heavy work, the only kind for which most of them are fitted. If a man is friendless he has an excellent chance to starve because the hospital turns him out before he is well enough to earn a living. No employer wants a gaunt-visaged convalescent.” “You would provide for him until he is able to provide for himself,” she said, comprehendingly. “Yes. We should not pronounce him cured until he was strong enough to earn his living.” They entered an avenue of poplars, on either side of which stood the rows of isolated wards, and were alone except for the flitting presence here and there of a white-jacketed attendant or a nurse in sombre gown. Mario told her that what she had made known to him at Palazzo Barbiondi had lit up his world again. When the news of the wedding reached him, he said, his thoughts were black indeed. It was as if the sun had fallen just as it had begun to fill the east with glory. The love of her had given him a new heart, a new mind, new senses. Suddenly all life had been transfigured with an infinite beauty. It was in the railway carriage returning to Milan that he learned of the wedding. He told her of the change that came over his spirit. Bitterly he cried out against her and the universal heart. The rapture that had raised him into heaven broke and he dropped into the pit of hell. And so it was until he learned that she was the dupe of--the forged message. He was glad for the warmth of sympathy that then suffused his being. He saw the cruel facts that had ruled her, the forces that had driven her to the other’s wish. “Our temple is in ruins,” he said, filled with pity for her and himself; “but perhaps it will some time be rebuilt. It must be!” he declared, passionately. “This love is a necessity of my life, and will be so long as life shall endure.” “But it must be content now,” she warned him, “to live as does the edelweiss of the Alps--that lonely plant which grows amid the snow.” “But always with a flower ready to bloom safe and warm in its heart,” he added. And he told her how hope had come to him the day before in the ruined monastery, where he had gone to live again, in its delicious memories, that hour they passed during the hailstorm. “The leaves were thick on the eglantine,” he said, “and the chapel was gay with sunshine and the voices of birds. All the growing, living things had entered upon their heritage of joy, and then it was that the light of a great hope, as if from prophecy, filled----”