The sun came streaming into the studio as he bent over her fair hands and kissed them.
"It is not all gloom and fog," she replied. "To-day the London sun is as bright and warm as it was in Italy when I was a child."
It was not alone the London sun, it was the sunshine of the heart; and it lasted all through the remainder of Marietta's life.
I.
Lady Mercy sat writing of love in the early hours of morning. She had been christened Mercy, but the people called her the "Windflower." She was born in a high March wind, which had once more wooed her sisters into life. They lay like a fall of snow in the adjacent forests.