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.
She was musing on the beauty and the sorrow of this lovely hapless land, and the famous words of Byron came aptly to her lips. She repeated them softly and sadly, and someone who had stolen upon her unaware answered musingly:
"Do you believe with Byron that the gift of beauty is always fatal, Miss Berlin?"
She started and flushed with annoyance. It was Julius Revington. He had become her very shadow, seeming unable to exist out of her sight.