Mr. Kenmore, who was naturally indolent and ease-loving, and who had been nurtured in these habits by his life of luxury and indulgence, found himself staggered by these heavy responsibilities that appeared to have been thrust upon him. The blood of Ronald Brooke seemed to cry aloud to him from the earth for vengeance on his murderer. "Why has Heaven selected me for the instrument of righting Elaine Brooke's wrongs?" he asked himself, in wonder. He did not relish the duty, but when he would fain have given it up, a voice within him loudly urged him forward in the path of duty. "What good can it do?" he answered back, impatiently, to that inward monitor. "Mr. Brooke is dead, Irene is dead, her mother has broken loose from all her old ties and associations, and hidden her life away in the great thronging world. Can vengeance bring the dead back, or give peace to the broken heart of that poor wronged woman?" Yet in spite of his sophistries and protestations the voice within still loudly echoed: "_Go on._" He wrote to Mrs. Brooke informing her of her erroneous supposition concerning Elaine's whereabouts, then he turned his whole attention to the Stuarts. "If I could see Clarence Stuart I could form my opinion of him much better," he thought. "I have nothing else to do. Why not follow them to Italy?" He went home to Baltimore and made his preparations for going abroad. There was no one to oppose his will. His parents were dead, his two sisters were married to wealthy men, and were too much absorbed in fashion and pleasure to miss him greatly. Somewhat reluctantly he went, not remembering that the path of duty is oftentimes the straight road to happiness. No dream came to him as he walked the deck those beautiful moonlit nights of summer and mused on the repulsive task to which he was going, that fate was leading him straight to the presence of her who had become a sweet and softened memory to his heart; whose childish willfulness and flitting spites had so irked him once, but which now he remembered only as "Delicious spites and darling angers, And airy forms of flitting change." Death had idealized his blue-eyed girl-bride, and he loved her now when it seemed too late. CHAPTER XXII. "Italia, oh, Italia, thou who hast The fatal gift of beauty which became A funeral dower of present woes and past." The words fell softly from the lips of Irene as she walked beneath the shade of the orange and olive and lemon trees in the villa garden. The balmy air was sweet with the breath of countless flowers, the birds sang sweetly in the boughs above her head, and the blue waves of the Arno ebbed and flowed at her feet with a pleasant murmur. Overhead the clear blue sky of Italy, which poets have painted in deathless verse and artists on immortal canvas, sparkled and glanced in all its radiant sapphire beauty.