"And she was only twenty," replied the feeble voice again, like a lament.
A heavy, lugubrious silence fell upon the twain, in that solitary corner of the great deserted terrace before the Adriatic.
"Would you like to read her last words, Vittorio?" asked Lucio.
The other started and nodded. Lucio drew out from an inner pocket his pocket-book, took from it a long white envelope, and drew delicately from it a picture post card. The two friends bent forward together over that piece of paper to distinguish its design and read the words thereon. On one side the post card had the address written in slender, tall calligraphy and firm handwriting, "à Don Lucio Sabini, Lung' Arno Serristori, Firenze." The postage-stamp was of the 24th of April of the previous year, and came from the Hospice of the Bernina. On the other side was a great panorama of glaciers, of lofty, terrible peaks, and printed beneath the German words, "Gruss vom Diavolezza." The same slender, upright characters had written, in a corner of the card, beneath the great strip of white of the glacier in English, "For ever, my love.—Lilian." Both raised their heads and looked at each other.
"She died the next day, the 25th of April," said Lucio, holding the card in his hands and gazing at it, as if he saw it for the first time. "These are her last words. She wrote them in the Hospice of the Bernina, and posted them in the letter-box of the façade of the Hospice. Next morning she left very early for La Diavolezza; at four o'clock in the afternoon she was dead, having fallen headlong from a lofty crevasse of the Isola Persa."
He spoke slowly, with a precise accent, that rendered even more sorrowful the expression of his words.
"Would you like to see where she died, Vittorio?" he resumed. "Look carefully."
Again, with tragic curiosity in the evening half-light, the two men leant over that funereal document.
"Look carefully. This is La Diavolezza, a mountain which is climbed without great difficulty, and where is unfolded an immense panorama of glaciers and peaks. I have been there and described it to her. Look carefully; she reached as far as here, and rested only an hour in this Alpine hut. She wanted to proceed at once to the glacier here, where it is marked, the Perso Glacier, this great black moraine that cuts the glacier in two, which is called the Isola Persa—it is written beneath. Look closely; you will not discover the crevasse where she fell, where she wished to fall, but it is here—where she wished to fall and to die."