As Tristan was about to yield to the overmastering temptation the memory of Hellayne conquered all other emotions. He turned back from the door and looked full into the girl's dark eyes. "You will speak to your mistress for me," he said to her, casting a swift glance into the moonlit garden. The girl looked at him with a puzzled air, but did not stir. "What am I to say to her?" she said. "That I will not enter these gates!" "You will not?" "No!" He snapped curtly. "Fool! How you will regret your speech!" Her face changed suddenly like a fickle sky, and there was something in her eyes too wicked for words. Without vouchsafing a reply, Tristan turned and lost himself in the desolation of Mount Aventine. The night marched on majestically. The moon and her sister planets passed through their appointed spheres of harmonious light and law, and from all cloisters and convents prayers went up to heaven for pity, pardon and blessing on sinful humanity that had neither pity, pardon nor blessing for itself, till, with magic suddenness, the dense purple skies changed to a pearly grey, the moon sank pallidly beneath the earth's dark rim and the stars were extinguished one by one. Morning began to herald its approach in the freshening air. Tristan still slept on his improvised couch, a marble slab he had chosen when he discovered that he had lost his way in the wilderness of the Aventine. His head on his arm he lay quite still among the flowers, wrapt in a sort of dizzy delirium in which the forms of Theodora and Hellayne strangely intermingled, until the riddles of life were blotted out together with the riddles of Fate. CHAPTER VI THE COUP Tristan spent the greater part of the day visiting the churches and sanctuaries, offering up prayers for oblivion and peace. His heart was heavy within him. Like the stray leaf that has been torn from its native branch and flutters resistlessly, aimlessly hither and thither, at the mercy of the chance breeze, nevermore to return to its sheltering bough, so the lone wanderer felt himself tossed about by the waves of destiny, a human derelict without a haven where he might escape the storms of life. Guiltless in his own conscience of an imputed sin, in that his love for Hellayne had been pure and holy, Tristan could find little comfort in the enforced penance, while his hungry heart cried out for her who had so willed it. And, as with weary feet he dragged himself through the streets of the pontifical city, he vaguely wondered, if his would ever be the peace of the goal. In the darkness in which he walked, in the perturbation of his mind, he longed more than ever to open his heart to some one who would understand and counsel and guide his steps.