“To the cemetery. Everybody goes there to-day.” Before you come to the cemetery at Orta you have to cross an untilled field which once formed part of it, but has been gradually disused. The graves enclosed in it were now unrecognisable and anonymous. Nothing marked them any more--neither name nor cross, not even a mound of earth. In memory of All Saints’ Day some unknown hand had scattered clusters of chrysanthemums here and there on the field, and the waste place was transformed into a kind of temporary garden. Edith and Maurice stopped a moment in this enclosure. It was bordered by a row of chestnut trees, whose leaves fluttered in the supporting softness of the air. A breath of wind was enough to strip them. With the coming evening a bit of fresh north wind arose, and the golden leaves fell indeed, spinning round and round and piling themselves up at last in the gutter along the main alley-way of the cemetery. One of them in its flight alighted on Edith’s hat. It was a desolate symbol to poise above that warmly tinted face, with its eyes of fire, that fleshly shape so animate with life in its most immobile moments, and it stirred the last depths of emotion in Maurice, overwrought as he was this day. He said nothing still, and she pointed out the chrysanthemums to him. “The pretty flowers,” she said. And to both of them came the reflection that the flowers were strewn above the dead. By an instinctive recoil upon themselves they glanced at the line of trees which half concealed them, and, moving nearer each to the other, embraced among the graves. III THE RUINS THE morning after this walk Maurice was called to the office of the hotel. “It’s for a registered letter. The postman wants you.” He recognised the yellow envelopes that his father used, and rapidly stripped off the seals, while the manager, catching sight of the amount of the remittance, observed him with an admiring air. The letter inside contained a French bill of one hundred francs and a cheque on the International Bank of Milan for eight thousand, signed by his sister Margaret. “Now,” he said to himself, “I am my own master.”