There was a pause before Mario replied that he counted it a great privilege to be at hand in the moment of Donna Hera’s need. The last word was still on his lips when Tarsis turned to Don Riccardo and asked if he were ready to go back to the villa, and the older man answered with a bare affirmative. Presently the car was brought about; as it shot away Hera and Mario followed. Now and again the highway bore close to the river’s margin, and the splash of the rampant water sounded in the dark. A little while and they stopped at the Barbiondi gates, where their ways parted--hers up the winding road to the house, his onward to the nearest bridge, that he might cross and ride back to Viadetta. “I regret that I cannot be with you to-night,” he told her. “An hour and I must start for Rome.” “Until Wednesday, then?” she said, giving him her hand. “Until Wednesday.” She spoke to Nero and was gone. A moment Forza lingered, looking into the darkness that enveloped her. Once or twice, as she moved up the road, he caught the sparking of her horse’s steel. At a turn in the way she passed into the light of the motor car’s lamps, and he gained one more glimpse of her, and was content. Then he set off for the Bridge of Speranza. CHAPTER II TARSIS AMONG the chieftains of production who were leading Italy to prosperity and power Antonio Tarsis held the foremost place. Son of a shop-keeper in Palermo, he began life poor and without influence. It had taken him less than twenty years to build up a fortune so large that the journals of new ideals pointed to it as a terrible example. Cartoonists had fallen into the habit of picturing him with a snout and bristled ears. There was a serious portrait of him in the directors’ room of one of the companies he ruled. It was painted by a man whose impulse to please was stronger than his artistic courage. He told all that he dared. In full length, it showed a man under forty, black-bearded, with a well-turned person of middle height; small, adroit eyes heavily browed, prominent nose inclined to squatness, spare lips and broad jaws; the portrait, at a glance, of a fighter of firm grain, fashioned for success in the great battle. So much for the Tarsis of paint and canvas. The one that faced you in the flesh had harder, crueler eyes; the living clutch of the lips was tighter; the faint yet redeeming human quality of the man in the picture was lacking. And in the hue of his skin, much darker than the painter had ventured, nature did not deny the land of his birth--Sicily. It was there, at the beginning of manhood, that chance threw him into the post of time-keeper for a silk-mill. He did his work so well that never a centesimo went to pay for moments not spent in the service of the company.